New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books

https://reactormag.com/new-kindle-feature-ai-answer-questions-books-authors/

57•mindracer•1h ago

Comments

savanaly•1h ago

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•1h ago

"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•1h ago

> 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•1h ago

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•46m ago

> 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•1h ago

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•1h ago

> 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.

catgary•1h ago

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•1h ago

>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•1h ago

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•43m ago

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•1h ago

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•46m ago

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?

thewebguyd•1h ago

> 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•1h ago

>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•1h ago

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•1h ago

You bought a kindle, they already did that to you.

johnnyanmac•1h ago

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•1h ago

Are you implying that an LLM needs to be trained on a specific piece of text to answer questions about it?

johnnyanmac•1h ago

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•1h ago

Having access to the text and being trained on the text are two different things.

catgary•21m ago

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•1h ago

> 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•1h ago

"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•1h ago

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•29m ago

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•1h ago

> My device, my content

I am quite sure Amazon doesn't sell you that.

bossyTeacher•1h ago

>My device, my content

Afaik, while the device is yours, everything else on it isn't.

micromacrofoot•1h ago

device is hardly yours unless you jailbreak it or collect bricks

freedomben•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

Fun fact: the first book Amazon remotely removed from Kindles was… 1984.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jul/17/amazon-ki...

DougMerritt•1h ago

Life mimics art.

nephihaha•1h ago

The name Kindle suggests Fahrenheit 451. We're going to destroy books and here's the kindling.

ctoth•1h ago

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.

tiahura•50m ago

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•1h ago

> 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•49m ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•47m ago

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•32m ago

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•1h ago

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•50m ago

So what part of this presentation agreement could possibly apply?

squigz•57m ago

> 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•37m ago

> 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•1h ago

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•1h ago

Have you read any of the kindle-only erotic slop-smut that's going these days? The poisoning is well underway.

charcircuit•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

What kind of books are you reading? You're telling on yourself (and very arrogant about it).

freedomben•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•41m ago

I don't mind bezos using 1.21 gigawatts per request, as long as it's only for a very short time.

georgefrowny•28m ago

Brutal on the crest factor though, you'll definitely get a snotty phone call from your power company if you keep that up.

giobox•1h ago

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•1h ago

That's been happening to me since before Netflix licked their first envelope. Have some sympathy for people born during memory shortages!

CGMthrowaway•1h ago

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Quantum-Mechanics-David-...

squigz•1h ago

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•1h ago

I'm an avid reader and I can assure you that it's very normal.

lm28469•1h ago

We need to baby sit homoconsomators every step of the way or they get scared and confused

TheServitor•1h ago

Forgetting what has happened earlier in a book you put down is very normal. Have you met your fellow humans?

supern0va•44m ago

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•1h ago

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.

georgefrowny•13m ago

> 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•1h ago

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•1h ago

> 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•1h ago

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•1h ago

> 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•52m ago

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•51m ago

> 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•50m ago

Because text analysis is substantially easier than video analysis?

ceejayoz•49m ago

Amazon has the Fallout scripts, subtitles, internal show bibles, etc. all available to them.

idontwantthis•1h ago

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•1h ago

Did you give it the text of the book and tell it to answer based on that?

renewiltord•49m ago

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.

stogot•1h ago

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•1h ago

> 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•1h ago

ITT: people who really hate reading

TRiG_Ireland•1h ago

Yes. I cannot work out who the intended audience for this feature is supposed to be.

nephihaha•1h ago

School children and lazy people who can't be bothered to read properly.

lm28469•1h ago

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•1h ago

I really don't understand why authors believe they have something to say about how I read their book.

nephihaha•1h ago

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•39m ago

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•51m ago

> 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.

syndacks•26m ago

100% required on all Pynchon novels that's for sure.

rahimnathwani•8m ago

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."

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