The Kindle App Now Has Artificial Intelligence Built In, Because of Course It Does.
It’s 2025, so every technology must now have an artificial intelligence component. No matter how useful these AI features are (though some are truly useful), they simply must exist, no matter how clunky or useless they may seem—though the line between these extremes often comes down to user preference. So if you’ve ever read a book in the Kindle app and wanted to ask your device a question about the text, Amazon has an AI bot for you.
Last week, Amazon announced ” Ask This Book ,” a new AI feature for the Kindle app. Now available in the iOS version of the app, it lets you ask Amazon’s AI questions about what you’re reading, whether you’ve bought or rented the book. You can highlight a section of text to include in your query and ask questions about the story’s plot, characters, relationships, and theme. According to Amazon, all answers will be contextual—meaning they’re supposedly related to the text—and, crucially, all answers will be spoiler-free. This should help avoid the classic mistake of Googling a book question and discovering a surprise plot twist or character death.
Amazon states that the “Ask This Book” feature is currently active for “thousands” of books written in English. As noted, at the time of writing, the feature is only available in the iOS version of the app, but Amazon is working to bring it to the Android app and Kindle devices next year.
Ask this book whether you like it or not.
If you think this feature might interest you, great! If you don’t want it—whether you’re a reader who doesn’t want AI to interfere with their reading experience, a publisher who doesn’t want Amazon training its AI based on their intellectual property, or a teacher who might see it as a potential cheating opportunity—then there’s bad news: Once Amazon makes the “Ask This Book” feature available for a specific book, it’s available forever, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. An Amazon spokesperson told Publishers Lunch : “To ensure a consistent reading experience, this feature is always on, and authors or publishers have no way to disable it for their books.”
This answer irritates me for two reasons. First, it’s always annoying when a company introduces a new feature without giving users the option to disable it. I don’t use Apple Intelligence, but I appreciate that Apple lets me turn it off . Meta, on the other hand, forces me to accept Meta AI , even though I never use it. It seems Amazon follows Meta’s user interface design principles.
But what’s even more astonishing is that authors and publishers have no say in whether this AI bot will be active for their books—especially retroactively. It would be a different matter if authors had to consent to their books being published on the Kindle platform in the future. But enabling it for “thousands” of titles available even before the “Ask This Book” service is, at the very least, disrespectful to authors and publishers.
Interestingly, Amazon evaded Publishers Lunch’s questions regarding licensing rights for the Ask This Book service and user protections, which is concerning given that generative AI has a tendency to hallucinate —or, in other words, completely make things up. While it can certainly help readers understand things they don’t understand when it’s working properly, there’s a real risk that AI will misinterpret questions, distort text, or outright lie, which could negatively impact the reader’s experience of the work, potentially having negative consequences for both the author and the publisher.
How does the “Ask This Book a Question” feature work on Kindle?
While this feature isn’t yet available on your Kindle, you’ll find it in the Kindle app. You can access it either through the menu of any book where this feature is available, or by highlighting the text in that book. The “Ask This Book a Question” feature will then display a list of questions it thinks might interest you. If none of them interest you, you can formulate your own questions and ask more after the bot responds.