Update: I’ve gotten new information, and as such I’m updating my opinion. I try to be good about actually being willing to change my mind when I learn new things. So. The situation isn’t as bad as I thought, though it’s still pretty sketchy. The Author’s Guild has a good breakdown: https://authorsguild.org/news/statement-on-amazon-kindle-ask-this-book-ai-feature/
Essentially, they’re specifically stressing they don’t train books on our content, which is… not great, as they’re still making some rights grabs, but at least I don’t risk my stuff getting trained on. While I’m definitely out of Kindle Unlimited for good, I may leave my books up on Amazon.
Hey everyone, this is an announcement I really did not want to make, but the short of it? I’m going to be removing my books from Amazon as of January 1st. I’ve already canceled renewal of them in Kindle Unlimited, and some are already coming out since they renewed in the last few days. Now, I’m sure some of you wonder why.
So. Amazon has announced they’re putting up a new feature called “Ask This Book”. In essence, it allows a reader to highlight passages in books to have AI provide supposedly spoiler-free answers to any question you might have about the book, up to that point. If you want more information about it, there’s Gizmodo and Writer Beware articles I’ve linked at the bottom of this. But to my knowledge, this function requires the book to be ingested into one of the AI models, otherwise it couldn’t answer questions for you about an entire series. If this was optional, I wouldn’t mind. I’d just opt out and be done with it. However, Amazon doesn’t allow us to opt out. They also didn’t tell us about this, at all. It’s just going to happen sometime in the coming year.
I requested my books be removed from Ask This Book a couple of days ago, after I learned of this feature. I told them that if they went forward with it, I’d be removing my books from Amazon. They sent me a message this morning saying that there’s no option to opt out of the feature. So, I’m going to do what I said I would. If they reverse course I’ll keep my ebooks up, but I’m not expecting them to.
As of January 1st, I’m going to be pulling down all my ebooks from Amazon. Paperbacks and hardcovers will stay up, unless Amazon decides to pull them. I’m sure it’ll take a bit longer, because Amazon tends to be that way, but I’ll be doing so. I’ll also be immediately putting the books up elsewhere, including here on Patreon or through a storefront I’m going to have to put together. I intend to do some series bundles here, as well as an ‘entire catalog’ option, with that probably being given to patrons at Demigod level automatically. It also means I can actually give books away while they’re published without issues, so there’s some good for it. But honestly, I’m still working out what to do. I intend to publish to Apple, Google Books, Kobo, and all the other storefronts I can get easy access to.
Oh, and to be clear: If you’ve purchased my ebooks via Amazon, by their rules you’ll still have access to them. This just prevents new sales.
This is unfortunate. It sucks. I also see little choice to protect my intellectual property and livelihood.
I’ve been considering transitioning to offering my books on other platforms for a while. It’s just unfortunate this is the impetus to do so.
The links I promised:
Ancient Dreams 