[HN Gopher] New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about...
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New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books
Author : mindracer
Score : 68 points
Date : 2025-12-12 20:24 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (reactormag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (reactormag.com)
| savanaly wrote:
| 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".
| Mouvelie wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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).
| akersten wrote:
| > 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
|
| I haven't seen a convincing argument why not. There's
| millions of librarians with the knowledge of more than 20
| years of literature under their belt. Why can they answer
| your questions about a book but the robot can't?
| foxyv wrote:
| 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.
| akersten wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That's what I mean by presumptuous. If that's really what
| they want the answer to, and what they object to, they
| should ask it plainly instead of alluding to it by
| asserting that there's some requisite but missing
| entitlement for the feature to exist on its face.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Either the Clerk would have read it, because they bought
| it, or borrowed it from the library.
|
| I mean they could have read it on company time as well.
|
| However, let us not use a straw man here. Its not some
| company clerk, its one of the largest company on earth
| using other people's copy right to make more money for them
| selves.
| catgary wrote:
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >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.
| catgary wrote:
| Sure, in the sense that any belief about the law isn't
| cut and dried until a judge has explicitly dismissed it
| in the court of law.
| dpark wrote:
| How likely do you think it is that Amazon doesn't have a
| pre-existing contract with these publishers to host these
| books on Amazon servers?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| 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?
| dpark wrote:
| I am so confused by some of the comments in this thread.
| All these weird mental gymnastics to argue that users
| should have _less_ rights.
|
| "Oh, you think you should be able to use an LLM with a
| book you paid for? Well you don't _own_ and book."
|
| Ok, and you like that? You want even less ownership? Less
| control?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _All these weird mental gymnastics to argue that users
| should have less rights_
|
| We probably agree more than not. But users getting more
| rights isn't universally good. To finish an argument, one
| must consider the externalities involved.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > 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.
| lawlessone wrote:
| >none of the author's business how I read it, in my view.
|
| my favorite way to eat is give other people my food, and have
| them tell me how it tastes and what not being hungry feels
| like.
|
| or to labor the point for the people that are having LLMs do
| their reading for them. Watching golf isn't playing golf.
| freedomben wrote:
| Once you've bought that food and it's on your plate, how
| would you feel about the farmer who grew it coming up and
| forcing you to eat it with a specific fork or only using
| approved utensils?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You bought a kindle, they already did that to you.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's not training on books, but it will answer questions about
| the book you're reading. Doesn't pass the sniff test.
|
| >My device, my content
|
| I don't think you own the kindle store and servers used to
| train the Ai.
| catgary wrote:
| Are you implying that an LLM needs to be trained on a
| specific piece of text to answer questions about it?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If you want proper answers, yes. If you want to rely on
| whatever reddit or tiktok says about the book, then I guess
| at that point you're fine with hallucinations and others
| doing the thinking for you anyway. Hence the issues brought
| up in the article.
|
| I wouldn't trust an LLM for anything more than the most
| basic questions of it didn't actually have text to cite.
| terafo wrote:
| Having access to the text and being trained on the text
| are two different things.
| catgary wrote:
| Luckily, the LLM has the text to cite, it can be passed
| in at inference time, which is legally distinct from
| training on the data.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > It's not training on books, but it will answer questions
| about the book you're reading. Doesn't pass the sniff test.
|
| What do you mean? Presumably the implication is that it will
| essentially read the book (or search through it) in order to
| answer questions about it. An LLM can of course summarize
| text that's not in its training set.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| "Reads the book" is the issue, yes. It's possible they
| aren't training. Vit to be frank, we're long past the BOTD
| where tech companies aren't going to attempt to traon on
| every little thing fed into their servers.
|
| Happy to be proven wrong, though.
| terafo wrote:
| There are LLM's that can process 1 million token context
| window. Amazon Nova 2 for one, even though it's definitely
| not the highest quality model. You just put whole book in
| context and make LLM answer questions about it. And given the
| fact that domain is pretty limited, you can just store KV
| cache for most popular books on SSD, eliminating quite a bit
| of cost.
| DennisP wrote:
| You could also fill the context with just the book portion
| that you've read. That'd be a sure-fire way to fulfill
| Amazon's "spoiler-free" promise.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > My device, my content
|
| I am quite sure Amazon doesn't sell you that.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| >My device, my content
|
| Afaik, while the device is yours, everything else on it isn't.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| device is hardly yours unless you jailbreak it or collect
| bricks
| freedomben wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lm28469 wrote:
| You don't mind having an llm owned by a megacorp lecturing you
| about the meaning of a book ?
|
| "Yes this is a good question about 1984 by George Orwell, you
| could indeed be tempted to compare the events of this book with
| current authoritarianism and surveillance but I can assure you
| this book is a pure work of fiction and at best can only be
| compared to evil states such as China and Russia, rest assured
| that as a US citizen you are Free"
| g947o wrote:
| Not your content, it's Amazon's content, you only purchased a
| license to view it, which can be revoked at any time if daddy
| Jeff is not happy.
|
| And I am not being cynical. That is literally what is on their
| web page, e.g.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTZT9PLM
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Fun fact: the first book Amazon remotely removed from Kindles
| was... 1984.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jul/17/amazon-
| ki...
| DougMerritt wrote:
| Life mimics art.
| nephihaha wrote:
| The name Kindle suggests Fahrenheit 451. We're going to
| destroy books and here's the kindling.
| ctoth wrote:
| Sure. But you knew what this comment was trying to say. It is
| obviously saying that what happens on the Kindle is between
| the customer and possibly Amazon, specifically that authors
| should not be involved. They got their money. That part of
| the transaction is complete. I know you realize this, it's
| annoying to read the constant "not your keys not your coins"
| reframe.
| g947o wrote:
| No. The author incorrectly thinks they "own" the "content"
| like with a physical book, which is the prerequisite for
| all the discussions following it. I pointed out, factually
| and correctly, that they don't own anything (other than the
| license) or have any control over anything.
| tiahura wrote:
| Most of it is _not_ Amazon's content. They don't own the
| book, so they can't sell you the book. Nemo dat.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Gimpei wrote:
| 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.
| nephihaha wrote:
| In the case of a novel, or even certain text books, the author
| relies on the reader not jumping ahead. Especially murder
| mysteries and those kind of genres. There are artistic reasons
| for that, and it can wreck the work.
|
| In my experience, AI summaries often miss points or
| misrepresent work. There is a human element to reading a well
| written novel. An AI will miss some of the subtleties and
| references.
| squigz wrote:
| But if I want to jump ahead and read the last page of a book
| first, is it reasonable for an author to tell me I can't do
| that?
| nephihaha wrote:
| From an artistic point of view, yes it is. It's a bit like
| doing a crossword with the answers in big letters next to
| it... It destroys the point.
| DennisP wrote:
| I agree but for some reason, there are people who enjoy
| doing that. I think they should be allowed to do as they
| like.
|
| In any case, Amazon claims this feature is spoiler-free
| and that would be easy to implement. It likely works by
| feeding the book into an LLM context, and they could
| simply feed in the portion you've already read.
| tshaddox wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| So what part of this presentation agreement could possibly
| apply?
| squigz wrote:
| > 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".
|
| The amount of people completely - and likely intentionally -
| missing your point is both frustrating and completely
| unsurprising.
|
| A quick reminder that this is part of HN's guidelines
|
| > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of
| what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
| Assume good faith.
| dpark wrote:
| > 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.
| Mouvelie wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Have you read any of the kindle-only erotic slop-smut that's
| going these days? The poisoning is well underway.
| charcircuit wrote:
| 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.
| Mouvelie wrote:
| 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.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| What kind of books are you reading? You're telling on
| yourself (and very arrogant about it).
| freedomben wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| DennisP wrote:
| I don't mind bezos using 1.21 gigawatts per request, as
| long as it's only for a very short time.
| georgefrowny wrote:
| Brutal on the crest factor though, you'll definitely get
| a snotty phone call from your power company if you keep
| that up.
| giobox wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That's been happening to me since before Netflix licked their
| first envelope. Have some sympathy for people born during
| memory shortages!
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Quantum-Mechanics-
| David-...
| squigz wrote:
| 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.
| potsandpans wrote:
| I'm an avid reader and I can assure you that it's very
| normal.
| lm28469 wrote:
| We need to baby sit homoconsomators every step of the way or
| they get scared and confused
| TheServitor wrote:
| Forgetting what has happened earlier in a book you put down
| is very normal. Have you met your fellow humans?
| supern0va wrote:
| 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. :)
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| 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.
| danielbln wrote:
| I use LLMs for that all the time. Most frontier models have
| books trained in, so I just ask for a spoiler free recap or
| ask about certain characters. Works well in my experience,
| and made jumping back into Wheel of Time a lot easier
| georgefrowny wrote:
| > 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| dcre wrote:
| For the reason I gave in my answer: it would be answering
| based on the text of the book. I don't expect it to be
| particularly great regardless because these features
| always use cheap models.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > For the reason I gave in my answer: it would be
| answering based on the text of the book.
|
| Why would that not also be true for the Fallout season
| one recap video?
| catgary wrote:
| Because text analysis is substantially easier than video
| analysis?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Amazon has the Fallout scripts, subtitles, internal show
| bibles, etc. all available to them.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Did you give it the text of the book and tell it to answer
| based on that?
| idontwantthis wrote:
| Does this feature put the entire text of the book into the
| context?
| charcircuit wrote:
| I hope not, it probably only goes up to the page you are
| on in order to avoid spoiling the later content.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| The entire book in the context at once?
| furyofantares wrote:
| That's probably 100k-150k tokens for most novels.
| stogot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| ITT: people who really hate reading
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| Yes. I cannot work out who the intended audience for this
| feature is supposed to be.
| nephihaha wrote:
| School children and lazy people who can't be bothered to read
| properly.
| lm28469 wrote:
| 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
| jeffbee wrote:
| I really don't understand why authors believe they have something
| to say about how I read their book.
| nephihaha wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > 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.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > This is perfectly reasonable fair use.
|
| Well thats questionable actually
|
| Sure the _result_ is transformative, but it had to consume the
| content in the first place to make a transformative. (grey
| area).
|
| Yes, you _could_ argue that its a plain review, but you need to
| prove that its actually reviewing it rather than just quoting.
| But as its the machine doing it, that further muddies the
| water. Is it the end user whos generating the review? does the
| kindle license actually allow them to do that?
|
| However, the other thing to note is that there is a contract
| between publishers and amazon that go over and above copyright.
| It will say how and where works can be distributed and how they
| can be processed. For example you're not able to distribute the
| book and then create your own audiobook version of it.
| syndacks wrote:
| 100% required on all Pynchon novels that's for sure.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| 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."
| captn3m0 wrote:
| 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.
| flakiness wrote:
| I occasionally buy DRM-free ebooks (tech books like O'Reilly)
| just to put it into NotebookLM, Claude etc.
|
| While I feel a certain amount of empathy to the authors, it's a
| table stake at this point to be honest.
| zingar wrote:
| I was imagining a feature that allowed me to search across all my
| books, which is something that O'Reilly Learning does (actually
| it gives you answers from their entire range since their model is
| a license to access all content).
|
| Their search was simultaneously the best and worst of all the
| early LLM applications. They have tons of high quality content
| and I've found a bunch of worthwhile books through searches. It's
| the worst because their template response is extremely
| unimaginative. I can be asking process questions about managing
| tech debt and it still gives me a code sample with every response
| as though I was asking "how do I add this button to my app".
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