With New ‘Ask this Book’ Kindle Feature, Amazon Wants Lost Readers to Ask AI for Help
A new generative AI feature has been welded onto a product again: Amazon’s “Ask this Book” for Kindle readers, which is basically a little chatbot that will live inside the book you’re e-reading, capable of answering “Wait, when did that good guy become a bad guy?”-type questions without making you go back and re-read the actual pages of the book a human author painstakingly wrote. It will roll out on Kindle devices as well as on Android next year.According to an Amazon blog post, you can “highlight any passage in a book you’ve bought or borrowed” and then ask questions “right on the page.” You get “instant, contextual, spoiler-free information,” about “plot details, character relationships, and thematic elements.” This is honestly a smart pitch to readers, irrespective of whether or not the feature is good. I recently got lazy and asked ChatGPT to refresh my memory about some characters in a book I was reading, and it told me about their eventual kids—but I didn’t even know they were romantically linked yet. A spoiler aversion-respecting chatbot could fix this mild annoyance, in theory.But AI and authors tend not to mix well (Disclosure: I’m an author whose book was in the controversial Books3 database, used as training data by Big Tech). In a post for Writer Beware, author and industry watchdog Victoria Strauss wrote that Amazon’s AI feature seems “to raise some rights concerns.”More notably, Amazon confirmed that participation isn’t optional. “To ensure a consistent reading experience, the feature is always on, and there is no option for authors or publishers to opt titles out,” an Amazon spokesperson told Publishers Lunch.To spell out one concern that Strauss and others are driving at: there’s an argument to be made that a chatbot output superimposed right onto the digital page is arguably making mini derivative works—which Amazon expressly denied to Publisher’s Lunch, saying “no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given.”An edition of a book with an index or glossary, or other added material for ease of reading would indeed be new material, and if a publisher wanted such a thing to exist, they would presumably have to draw up a new publishing contract with the author. However you feel about AI, this is clearly a way of sidestepping any such old fashioned publishing norms. But it seems Amazon also sprang this on authors and publishers without warning them, which is a separate issue. Publisher’s Lunch reached out to agents and publishing executives and found that most of them had never heard of “Ask this Book.” As a writer, it’s starting to feel pretty normal to learn very late that my already feeble sense of control over how my work is used by AI was once again eroded long ago without my knowledge, and that there’s nothing I can do about it at this point.
