VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Advocates for the blind protest loss of text-to-speech on Kindle — Amazon gave publishers the option to disable the feature after the Authors Guild complained it would cut into audio book sales. In response, a group advocating for the blind protested outside the Authors Guild office in Manhattan today.

Google CEO tells newspapers not to piss consumers off — Eric Schmidt gave the closing keynote at the Newspaper Association of America’s conference, where he said: “I would encourage everybody, think in terms of what your reader wants. These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more.”

Delivery startup DeliveryEdge shuts its doors — The company, previously known as LicketyShip, first tried to charge big fees for same-day delivery, then abandoned that model to aggregate local courier services.

Library of Congress starts putting videos on YouTube — So if you’ve got “the world’s largest connection of audiovisual materials,” what would you put online first? The LOC went with 70 videos, including this interview with Goosebumps author R.L. Stine.

Yahoo Messenger comes to the iPhone — Now users can send instant messages and share photos on their iPhone or iPod Touch.

Google finishes worldwide rollout of local search results — Most VentureBeat readers are probably already familiar with the local map that sometimes pops up showing nearby results when you search for things like “restaurant” or “dentist.”

Zynga brings Mafia Wars to the iPhone — The game, which is available for free in the App Store, already has 9 million monthly users on Facebook.

More details on why Major League Baseball benched Microsoft Silverlight — This year, the MLB.com site switched to using Adobe’s Flash Format, not Silverlight, for broadcasting its games. CNET’s sources say the two biggest conflicts were the inability of some users to download Silverlight on their work computers and the fact that MLB believed Silverlight is too unstable.

The New York Times says the Associated Press’s real enemies are its customers — The New York Times’ Saul Hansell responds to the just-announced-and-rather-vague new initiative from the AP to track down pirated content by pointing out some deeper flaws in the AP model.

Silicon Valley eager for its share of stimulus dollars — The Wall Street Journal characterizes the move as a de facto shift from a libertarian political philosophy to a “Keynesian ” one.

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Tags: co:amazon, co:associated-press, co:DeliveryEdge, co:microsoft, co:yahoo, co:zynga, people:Eric-Schmidt