Amazon has reportedly added a new feature to the Kindle iOS app: ‘Ask this Book,’ a chatbot that answers questions about the book you’re reading without giving spoilers about what comes next. It does this by drawing only from the pages you’ve already been through. 

The obvious take is to read this as another Amazon power move. That take will always get applause. Even if true, it could miss a much more important point.

A new layer is forming between reader and text: interpretation on demand, delivered inside the reading interface. Kindle is the first place many readers will meet it, but it won’t be the last. Once a mainstream platform turns a book into something you can query, the interpretation of a book becomes a kind of service.

Amazon calls Ask this Book an ‘expert reading assistant’ and pitches it as a way to ask about plot details, character relationships, and themes without breaking your flow. Access sits inside the book menu, or you can highlight a passage and ask from there.  

That product design choice matters because it reframes what the Kindle edition competes on. The book isn’t only the book. Amazon’s edition becomes an experience with built-in support.

This is where the publisher’s problem begins.

The Edition Arms Race

For years, digital formats have competed on convenience. AI pushes that competition into something more intimate: comprehension, recall, orientation. A reader stuck in a long fantasy series doesn’t want a lecture on authorial intent. They want to know who a character is, why a scene matters, what a line refers back to. They want help without spoilers.

Ask this Book meets that need in a way print can’t. And it creates a new kind of ‘value-add’ that isn’t a special edition cover or sprayed edges. It’s behavioural. It changes how people move through the text. None of this will affect readers who don't want this kind of interactive experience. But it would be wrong to assume that there aren’t any readers who want this, or that this feature won’t go on to redefine the reading experience in the future.

Amazon says Ask this Book is available now for thousands of English-language books in the US on iOS, with plans to bring it to Kindle devices and Android systems next year. 

That roadmap is a major signal: this is a direction, not a test.

Rights, Questions, Won’t Stay Theoretical

Amazon has confirmed that authors and publishers can’t opt out, and that the feature is always on. 

That single detail should draw focus, because it establishes a precedent: platforms can add an AI interpretive layer over a book by default.

Amazon also says the answers are non-shareable and non-copyable, and only available to readers who have purchased or rented the book. 

That addresses one fear (mass redistribution of excerpts), but it doesn’t answer the deeper one: who decides what ‘allowed use’ looks like when the text is being transformed into a conversational interface?

Publishers have been used to thinking about AI in terms of copyright, training datasets and licensing. Reading features sit in a different zone, they are not even a part of the conversation yet. But, I have been privately advising clients to view reading features as a whole new set of emerging formats.

Current publishing contracts aren’t built for this evolving market. This topic in particular will require its own blog post, so there will be more on that later.

Over the next year, expect this to land in negotiations in a euphemistic form: ‘feature support,’ ‘reader assistance,’ ‘enhanced functionality.’ The vocabulary used matters, because publishers and authors should be able to define terms, or boundaries, on how their books are read.

Accuracy is a Trust Problem, not a Technical Footnote

A reading assistant doesn’t need to be malicious to cause damage. It only needs to be confidently wrong. This is really important because what could potentially be a great reading experience can go wrong if improperly rolled out.  

Amazon’s own recent experience with AI recaps on Prime Video is a neat illustration: the company pulled AI-generated recaps after errors were spotted in a high-profile test. 

Different medium, same lesson. Once an automated layer summarises or explains a story, those mistakes become part of the audience’s understanding.

So, the publishing question becomes practical: what standards should apply to AI layers that speak with the book’s authority? This is not a science fiction question from the future. This is a quality control question that publishers must address now.

Piracy is the elephant in the room. Not just the kind of piracy that AI companies have used to train their models, but the fact is, piracy has been a huge problem well before AI companies came along. And these books were being pirated by readers, actual readers who go to bookshops and buy books.

Here’s the uncomfortable reality: readers who want this functionality already have routes to it. General-purpose AI tools exist. Pirated files exist. People will combine them.

That’s why pure resistance can be self-defeating. If the paid ecosystem refuses to meet a reader expectation, the expectation won’t disappear. It just migrates. Napster came about because of the stringent rules that the music industry had regarding who could access their music, resulting in a demand for a one stop platform where all music could be downloaded. With so many digital tools available, it is only a matter of time before there are many providing this service. A paid ecosystem will ensure that people who wish to (and can afford to) easily access these features won’t go looking for them anywhere else.

Amazon’s ‘non-shareable, non-copyable’ claim is an attempt to keep the interaction inside a controlled, paid environment. 

Publishers don’t have to like that environment to recognise the incentive structure.

A More Useful Way to Think About the Next Year

Publishers and authors need a framework for the coming wave.

Five questions will keep coming back, feature by feature:

1.      Consent: can the rightsholder opt in or opt out, title by title? If not, what leverage remains? 

2.      Scope: what exactly is the feature doing with the text (Q&A, recap, translation, ‘story so far’)? Amazon is already bundling multiple AI reading features into the Kindle ecosystem. 

3.      Quality control: what happens when the assistant is wrong, and how are corrections handled? Prime Video’s recap pull shows how quickly an ‘assistive’ layer can become a reputational risk. 

4.      Data and value: what signals does the platform collect from reader questions, and who benefits from that insight?

5.      This is the really tricky one. If publishers don't want Amazon to be leading this new format, which is evolving, are they going to be building their own versions so that readers and authors have alternatives?

Once you ask those questions, the posture shifts. The issue stops being ‘Amazon did a thing.’ The issue becomes ‘the reading interface is changing, and publishing needs to be able to enter the discussion to set terms for it, to safeguard quality control.’

The Authors Guild also weighed in on this new development with concerns about unspecified, and therefore susceptible to violation, rights. Their concern is that ‘given Amazon’s stronghold on ebook retail, it could usurp the burgeoning licensing market for interactive AI-enabled ebooks and audiobooks.’

These questions and concerns need to be pondered, and swiftly acted upon. If the opportunity is successfully negotiated, publishers and authors can turn their existing strengths into assets the assistant layer can’t fake: clean metadata, authoritative character lists, timelines, glossaries, author-approved notes. Editorial work has always been about reducing reader confusion. AI simply makes that work visible in a new form.

Ask this Book is a signal flare. The decisions it forces won’t be unique to Amazon, and they won’t wait politely.

Sources:

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/books-and-authors/kindle-recaps-feature-ebook-series-refreshers

https://www.theverge.com/news/844538/kindle-app-ask-this-book-ai-ios

https://authorsguild.org/news/statement-on-amazon-kindle-ask-this-book-ai-feature/