> 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.

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.

> My device, my content

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

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.

> 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.

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.)

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

>My device, my content

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

"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).”

> 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.

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.

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.

>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.

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"

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.

Or were away from the book for a while and are coming back to it. I've read 1000 page books that I just got tired of reading, so put 'em down for a bit to read something else. Anathem by Neal Stephenson comes to mind.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

assistant.koplugin is pretty good. I've been using it for a while now.

Onyx has an AI feature in their boox which came very surprisingly with a firmware update a couple of month ago. It does the same thing - however: this needs constant access to the Internet to work and with boox you can switch it off. The article states that on Amazon apps/devices this will be perma-on and I'm sure that will do wonders for your data plan, particularly on phones. /s

That's a privacy nightmare. I absolutely would not want authors to have access to this information.

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.

How do you know they're non-trivial if you're not familiar with the material? Can you provide some examples? How long have you been doing it? Do your kids like it?

Just curious, not trying to attack you :)

> 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...

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

Given different printings and formats for books, I’d be very surprised if asking about a specific page number works reliably at all across books. I don’t even know if epub has page numbers embedded to keep track because the number of words on a page of an ereader is entirely arbitrary. My wife has her kindle in grandma mode or something. Only about 50 words fit on a page.

I would expect much more reliable results from chapter numbers though.

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

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

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