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".

> 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.

  "Ask this Book is currently only available in the Kindle iOS app in the US, but Amazon says it “will come to Kindle devices and Android OS next year."

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”.

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).

While I feel a certain amount of empathy to the authors, it's a table stake at this point to be honest.

> 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 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)

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.