New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books
95 comments
·December 12, 2025savanaly
If they're not using the book text to train models (keeping the focus on this particular new Kindle feature), where's the room for objection? My device, my content, it's none of the author's business how I read it, in my view.
Edit: Given I've been a reader of HN for some time, I am perfectly aware that on Kindle you don't own the content, just a license to the content. Don't need any more people pointing this out! Lol. In my house we still call owning a license to something that is not likely to be revoked "owning it".
Marsymars
> My device, my content, it's none of the author's business how I read it, in my view.
In practice, that's not the case though, e.g. publishers on Kindle can choose not to allow text-to-speech assistive functionality.
benmanns
Audiobook publishers require/request this when you sell subsidiary rights. We’ve been able to push back citing accessibility concerns. I find it really annoying when not available for my own reading.
dpark
> where's the room for objection?
I suspect most of the people arguing this way would be in favor of more end user rights if we were talking about anything except the right to use AI.
“Rights good, AI bad” somehow leads to the insane argument that it’s a good thing you don’t have rights over the book you bought.
“You don’t really own the book” is a crazy argument unless the person saying this wants the locked-down DRM world where you can’t own a piece of media.
Gimpei
Couldn’t agree more. This is actually a super useful feature. I can’t think of how many times I’ve been reading a book and some minor character resurfaces and I’m like, who the hell is that guy? Now I can know. I can also get information on historical context. Who knows, maybe I can finally read Ulysses without having to have 5 other books.
rightbyte
> My device, my content
I am quite sure Amazon doesn't sell you that.
freedomben
I wish it was "my device, my content" but it absolutely isn't. If you want that you have to buy from a DRM-free source, and Kindle is the absolute opposite of that.
bko
What does this have to do with the parent's comment?
Okay it's not 100% my device my content, so I shouldn't be allowed to run a local AI against the text?
freedomben
IMHO you should be able to enjoy your books however you want. If you want to run a local AI against it, more power to you.
But my opinion doesn't matter. Only Amazon's does. That's the point I was making. The premise of "my device, my content" is flawed (because of the DRM Amazon uses) and undermines the argument.
tshaddox
Amazon is selling digital copies (or licenses, if you like) of the books, which means they need permission from the copyright holders. This permission is likely backed by a contractual agreement that covers some details about how Amazon presents the digital copies to the end users.
(This of course wouldn't be the case if they were reselling physical books.)
ctoth
So what part of this presentation agreement could possibly apply?
bossyTeacher
>My device, my content
Afaik, while the device is yours, everything else on it isn't.
micromacrofoot
device is hardly yours unless you jailbreak it or collect bricks
Mouvelie
"Amazon DID NOT answer PubLunch’s questions about “what rights the company was relying upon to execute the new feature was not answered, nor did they elaborate on the technical details of the service and any protections involved (whether to prevent against hallucinations, or to protect the text from AI training).”
akersten
> what rights the company was relying upon to execute the new feature
what rights does a bookstore clerk need to answer questions about a product on the store's shelves? what a presumptuous question
johnnyanmac
Yeah, the "but what about a human" argument doesn't really work here. Scale of data matters as always. And an Ai for kindle has the scale of 20 years of literature (and more if they just scrape the internet).
foxyv
Is the "clerk" scanning the books an digitizing them to generate other products using an LLM under the guise of "Answering Questions?" I believe this is the question being asked.
Companies like Amazon and Google have some really sticky fingers when it comes to intellectual property and personal data. I think it's worth asking these questions and holding them accountable for exploiting data that doesn't rightly belong to them.
catgary
You don’t need any rights to execute the feature. The user owns the book. The app lets the user feed the book into an LLM, as is absolutely their right, and asks questions.
Rebelgecko
1. The user doesn't own the book, the user has a revocable license to the book. Amazon has no qualms about taking away books that people have bought
2. I doubt the Kindle version of the LLM will run locally. Is Amazon repurposing the author-provided files, or will the users' device upload the text of the book?
johnnyanmac
>The app lets the user feed the book into an LLM, as is absolutely their right,
I don't think that's cut and clear yet. Throwing media onto someone else's server may count as distribution.
thewebguyd
> protect the text from AI training
Hasn't training been already ruled to be fair use in the recent lawsuits against Meta, Antrhopic? Ruled that works must be legally acquired, yes, but training was fair use.
charcircuit
This sounds useful for when you forget something that happened chapters earlier or when you space out and need to figure out what's happening. This feature should work for the user, author's shouldn't be able to deprive me of this tool.
georgefrowny
> when you space out and need to figure out what's happening
Ok it's not just me that gets to the end of a page and it's like the page didn't exist.
On the other hand the times I use the search function on the ereader most are when I stumble across a continuity error. It would be interesting if a story-reading AI can be used to detect those. Not that I want there to be less human editing in books, if anything we seem to need more.
michaelbuckbee
Fantasy series seem like they've gotten longer and longer and it's often years between volumes. Many authors have started doing recaps of their previous books at the start of later volumes, but not all.
I could see this being useful for that.
Mouvelie
Good lord, at this point just drone off in front of a Netflix show. How bad has it gotten that you even suggest that one can "forget what happened chapters earlier" ? This is not normal.
giobox
This is hardly that strange, life gets in the way for many of us. I too have many times wished for an easy way to recap a book I've had to put down for a week or two - this is by no means an endorsement of how Amazon have done it here, but you are making incredibly arrogant assumptions about how others enjoy books.
Y_Y
That's been happening to me since before Netflix licked their first envelope. Have some sympathy for people born during memory shortages!
supern0va
If you have ample free time and few commitments and/or you read very short pop fiction, I could see how you might believe this. But there's a vast world of very long and dense literature, and also...people have kids and a life that gets in the way. Combine the two and...well, I can see why this feature would be useful. :)
TheServitor
Forgetting what has happened earlier in a book you put down is very normal. Have you met your fellow humans?
potsandpans
I'm an avid reader and I can assure you that it's very normal.
wahnfrieden
What kind of books are you reading? You're telling on yourself (and very arrogant about it).
freedomben
My thought exactly. Not all books are the same, and I'm willing to bet that GP is not reading the same books that I am, and not with the same goals.
lm28469
It's more telling about the current state of affairs than the person who commented. Forgetting things is part of life, move on, we don't need daddy bezos sucking 1.21 gigawatts per request to tell you that some side character drunk a beer 12 chapters ago so you can enjoy the joke you just missed.
squigz
I'm an avid reader. I'm reading The Silmarillion right now. There have been countless times where a short summary of an area/character/etc has been helpful. Luckily, in this particular case, there are very good Tolkien fan dictionaries that serve well.
As another example, I read the Aubrey-Maturin series earlier this year. Many times I would have liked a quick summary of a previous voyage or of a political plotline or something.
Don't be so judgemental.
gwbas1c
> To ensure a consistent reading experience, the feature is always on, and there is no option for authors or publishers to opt titles out.
> It also sounds as though authors and publishers were, for the most part, not notified of this feature’s existence.
This is perfectly reasonable fair use.
I'm starting to realize that a lot of content creators either don't understand fair use, or otherwise are unreasonable control freaks.
rahimnathwani
It's super-annoying that the article begins with a photo of a Kindle e-reader, and it's only once you read the last sentence that you find:
"Ask this Book is currently only available in the Kindle iOS app in the US, but Amazon says it “will come to Kindle devices and Android OS next year."stogot
I’m looking forward to this. Especially reading old classics, or catching up on an old series and trying to figure out “is this character the sister or niece of the main protagonist? Outline their character development”
I used to have to read fan wikis to figure this out.
But it will especially be useful for all the textbooks I’ve bought years ago. Being able to ask it questions (to the content itself) is better than asking ChatGPT or Gemini because they don’t have the content (they’re summarizing summaries found on the web)
ceejayoz
> I used to have to read fan wikis to figure this out.
I would much rather read a fan wiki than hope a LLM correctly understood a book's plot, at least with the current state-of-the-art of things.
Case in point: Amazon's own AI gets significant details of its own prestige TV show wrong:
https://gizmodo.com/fallout-ai-recap-prime-video-amazon-2000...
The Fallout fan wiki probably at least knows the Great War was in 2077.
renewiltord
Seems like a great feature. What I’d really like is a “recap for me till here” for books I started reading then stopped for whatever reason. I was reading Unsong for a bit (great book, very enjoyable) and then lately the baby has wanted a lot more attention so I didn’t get much reading done. I just want to catch up quick so I can continue.
LLMs are great for this, for the plot and character questions, etc.
Authors have nothing to do with it. It’s my device, my book that I bought. It would be like if YouTube banned a screen reader. These are at two different levels of the stack.
ceejayoz
> LLMs are great for this, for the plot and character questions, etc.
The article links to a clear, direct counterexample of this claim. By Amazon, even.
https://gizmodo.com/fallout-ai-recap-prime-video-amazon-2000...
dcre
It's not that direct a counterexample. We have no idea what underlying data from the Fallout show they gave to the model to summarize. Surely it wasn't the scripts of the episodes. The nature of the error makes me think it might have been given stills of the show to analyze visually. In this case we know it is the text of the book.
ceejayoz
> It's not that direct a counterexample.
Amazon made a video with AI summarizing their own show, and got it broadly wrong. Why would we expect their book analysis to be dramatically better - especially as far fewer human eyes are presumably on the summaries of some random book that sold 500 copies than official marketing pushes for the Fallout show.
idontwantthis
I’ve found the complete opposite as recently as last week. When I ask a deep question about a book it will hallucinate whole paragraphs of bogus justification and even invent characters
dcre
Did you give it the text of the book and tell it to answer based on that?
renewiltord
The LLM just working on its own is just generative intelligence. You have to ground it if you want the real stuff. The Kindle app has the text of the book and I'd want it to put that in the LLM context.
syndacks
100% required on all Pynchon novels that's for sure.
Mouvelie
So...Are all Amazon books available on Kindle ? So...All books are content for the LLM behind it, I suppose ?
Welp. Seems perfect for a poison data effort !
Y_Y
Have you read any of the kindle-only erotic slop-smut that's going these days? The poisoning is well underway.
jeffbee
I really don't understand why authors believe they have something to say about how I read their book.
nephihaha
They can't force you do anything, but a book or a piece of music etc, is often designed in a particular order so you get a particular effect.
You don't look up the end of a whodunnit before reading the beginning because that would make it kind of pointless.
DennisP
And yet, some people enjoy doing that. I have no idea why but I think they should be allowed to do it.
In any case, Amazon claims this is spoiler-free, which would be easy to implement by feeding only the portion you've read into the LLM context.
ITniggah
[flagged]
Starlevel004
ITT: people who really hate reading
lm28469
Nah just tech fanatics stuck in 7 layers of bubbles who spend too much time in front of screens and not enough time with people in the real world
TRiG_Ireland
Yes. I cannot work out who the intended audience for this feature is supposed to be.
nephihaha
School children and lazy people who can't be bothered to read properly.
There's also a few plugins for KOReader that achieve the same:
- https://github.com/omer-faruq/assistant.koplugin, which is forked from:
- https://github.com/drewbaumann/AskGPT
The first one even has prompts for quick recaps, summarize, translations, and more.