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".
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.
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.
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)
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
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).
Come to think of it, given how early O’Reilly had this it’s shocking to me that Amazon hasn’t done this sooner.
The O’Reilly Learning search was simultaneously the best and worst of all the early LLM applications. They have tons of high quality content that underpins very useful answers. I’ve also found a bunch of worthwhile books by looking through the sources.
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”.
> I'm on page 750 of Anathem. Please give me a recap.
> You are currently reading the section of the book where the main characters have been launched into orbit aboard a repurposed military rocket and are preparing to board the alien starship, the Daban Urnud.
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.
My kids have book reports and stuff. Lately I can use AI to generate non-trivial questions about the books and use it to quiz them without me knowing anything about the books. Been super useful.
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?
Who asked for this? I thought Amazon was all about customer obsession, and I'm having a hard time imagining readers saying "You know? This book would SEND ME if it had a chat assistant."
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 55.0 ms ] threadEdit: 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".
Welp. Seems perfect for a poison data effort !
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.
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)
> 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.
- 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.
While I feel a certain amount of empathy to the authors, it's a table stake at this point to be honest.
Come to think of it, given how early O’Reilly had this it’s shocking to me that Amazon hasn’t done this sooner.
The O’Reilly Learning search was simultaneously the best and worst of all the early LLM applications. They have tons of high quality content that underpins very useful answers. I’ve also found a bunch of worthwhile books by looking through the sources.
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”.
> I'm on page 750 of Anathem. Please give me a recap.
> You are currently reading the section of the book where the main characters have been launched into orbit aboard a repurposed military rocket and are preparing to board the alien starship, the Daban Urnud.
more recap details follow....
I would expect much more reliable results from chapter numbers though.
Just curious, not trying to attack you :)
Especially if I can get some sort of stats on the questions.
Like, if there were a lot of questions about when a character did something, then I know I wrote that badly.
Or if people talk about a set of characters, then I know that those characters made an impact.
Or if no-one asks about the book itself, but about some plot point or worldbuilding idea.
In general, if I, the author, can get a peek at this data too, it would be of immense value to me (and my publisher).