Amazon Wants Your Kindle To Think For You — But ‘Ask My Book’ AI Has Already Sparked A Fight Over Author Consent And Creative Control

Previously, top AI companies have faced a string of complaints and lawsuits from authors and news publishers over copyright infringement.

• Amazon Kindle introduced ‘Ask My Book’ last week, a feature that provides readers with context and other information about the book or passage they are reading.
• Some social media users, including authors, have flagged concerns about unfair use of published material by AI.
• Meanwhile, Amazon has beefed up its Kindle line with new releases and AI-enabled features this year.

A new Amazon Kindle feature is reigniting a familiar flashpoint: concerns about AI’s role in publishing and the risk of unfair use and copyright infringement.

Last week, Amazon announced ‘Ask My Book,’ a new feature on the Kindle platform that provides readers with context and other information about the book or passage they are reading. The company is pitching it as an “expert reading assistant” that answers questions about plot, characters, and themes without spoilers or disrupting the reading flow.

While some welcome the feature as helpful, others are questioning whether Amazon secured authors’ consent, viewing it instead as yet another case of AI companies exploiting published works without permission or fair compensation for their creators.

Social Media Blacklash

“This feature is so invasive,” a Reddit user posted in a thread about the new Kindle feature. “Authors are not able to opt out of their books being scoured by the AI that powers this. Their books, their words, their hard work. All lost to training Amazon’s AI without permission from authors.”

The backlash was also brewing on X. “We did not ask for this,” according to a post by an account linked to Yoav Blum, a science fiction author. Another novelist, Victoria Strauss, said the feature is, in effect, an "in-book chatbot." Stocktwits could not verify whether the accounts belonged to the same people as claimed; however, the predominant sentiment on X was negative (72%), according to a Grok sentiment analysis of X posts about the feature.

Over the years, there has been a string of complaints and lawsuits from authors and publishers globally against AI companies for unauthorized use and repurposing of their work without their permission. 

In September, Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement to resolve a class-action lawsuit brought by a group of authors. Meanwhile, leading AI firms, including OpenAI, Perplexity, and Meta, have struck dozens of content-licensing agreements with news publishers.

Amazon did not respond to a Stocktwits query regarding these concerns as of the press time.

Amazon Beefs Up Kindle

Kindle’s ‘Ask My Book’ is currently available for “thousands” of English-language books on the Kindle iOS app in the U.S, and will be enabled on Kindle devices and Android OS next year. In a response to PC Mag, an Amazon spokesperson said the feature is “always on, and there is no option for authors or publishers to opt titles out.”

Although a minor revenue contributor to Amazon’s topline, the company has been beefing up its Kindle lineup with the launch of the Kindle Paperwhite in April and the newer models of Kindle Scribe and Kindle Colorsoft, the company's first color-screen e-book reader, in recent months.

Earlier this year, Kindle rolled out AI Recaps, a feature that generates summaries of previously read sections to help readers quickly get back up to speed, and an Assistive Reader tool, which reads aloud e-books with synchronized highlighting. It also enabled transferring previously purchased ebooks from a computer to the Kindle via a cable, something that was not previously available.

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