[mhaymo]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it seems to me that it's the consumer, not Amazon, that's being asked to pay extra fees. The consumer bought an Audiobook, Amazon wants to provide read-along transcription for that audiobook, but the publisher wants the consumer to have to pay extra for that.

[scarface74]

Do you think that Amazon couldn’t offer a sum of money to publishers that was lower than the retail cost to allow a real, accurate transcript?

The music publishers accepted an offer from Apple to allow any song from anywhere to be counted as a “purchase” for $25 a year through “iTunes Match”. There is some number between $0 and $full_wholesale_price that the publishers would accept.