Torching Kindle (and Probably My Career, YOLO)

So, as I said, I’m removing my books from Kindle.

I’m starting with series but I expect to pull the rest too. No future books will be published there.

Early April, Amazon announced their new Recaps features for series books–US readers were the first to try out recaps for bestselling English-language series books.

Nowhere on there do they mention generative AI creating the recaps, of course–people had to reach out for that info.

I’m not sure if authors and publishers whose books are already available that way were notified or not, but I know the rest of us weren’t. This is all the information available on KDP’s site about it.

These “recaps”, summaries of books in a series, are generated entirely by AI. They admit it may contain errors. There is no opportunity to review or correct. There is no way to opt-out.

There has been no update to their Terms of Service for KDP authors/publishers clarifying whether books are scanned and “forgotten” or whether they become part of Amazon Nova’s training data.

I don’t have an issue with recaps, in and of themselves. If this were optional, if users could provide their own (many authors do within books themselves), I might not care. But any feature that cannot be opted out of raises a pretty big red flag in my eyes.

So I reached out to KDP with some basic questions.

• Are the scanned books “forgotten” or made a part of Amazon’s training data?
• Why was there no update to the ToS explaining this?
• What is the environmental impact?

That was on April 23.

When it was clear the first KDP rep could not answer my questions, I was told to wait a few days while he researched. Then I got a new one who told me to wait a few days while he researched.

At last I got an answer today, May 12.

They can’t tell me.

No one knows. Or at least no one wants to say. They took weeks to get back to me and still did not have an answer.

No one will reassure me how our books are used. No one will say why there’s been no ToS update warning us about this. And even if this is not as nefarious as it seems, even if i take this at face value as something truly benign: if they get no pushback, if they do not allow opting out, and they refuse to offer transparency, this is the first step in many that will lead to very bad places.

Why should it matter at this point, right? It’s inevitable. My stolen books have already been sold to various copies to build their plagiarism machines like Facebook’s “AI” chatbots, right?

It matters. Everything, every little bit, matters.

We know about the high environmental impact and massive carbon footprint and it’s worse than people realized. Grok is literally poisoning the air in entire communities. The humans paid pennies in developing nations to train this tech have severe PTSD and no support after being exposed to the firehouse of awful scraped from the internet.

Now the president of the US has fired the director of copyright after a report came out on AI training data and usage (suggesting the theft of copyright work to then compete with it is beyond fair use) and the GOP wants a ten-year ban on AI regulations–all this to loot from copyright, destroy entire industries and the fucking environment, to devastate the work force, to silence and stifle creative thought. genAI like this is built on stolen work, trained by exploited people, and is hastening climate change. It is the tool of fascism, supported by everyday users who are too fucking lazy to write a goddamn email.

I cannot stop it but I will not accept being a part of it.

Fuck the techbros. Fuck the pirates. Fuck Facebook.

And fuck Kindle.

There are two circumstances where I consistently make more on Kindle than I do Kobo–one is the day I have a new release, and the other is the rare time a book is recommended in a high traffic place or something with reach outside my circle (last time was about three years ago on recommendation thread for The Book Devouring Horde–that was for Livi). But it’s still the place most new readers go–the first question anyone in the US and most of Canada asks is “Is the book on Kindle?” So it’s next to impossible to have a career self-publishing with no real reach without also having things on Kindle for the sake of convenience, at least with a US audience.

But some things are wrong, and here we are.

I’m waiting until the end of the month to remove my books so readers who prefer Kindle have time to pick up what they might’ve been waiting for payday to get. That’s two and a half weeks.

Books can still be sideloaded to Kindle–I sell direct at Payhip for that reason. If you’re on your tablet or phone for reading, most other stores offer apps (like Kobo). And remember, your bought books on Kindle will remain in your library–they don’t go anywhere, you’ll still have your notes.

I strongly caution Kindle users to consider having an alternative in general because Amazon can fuck with them as well when they’ve got users locked in, but the likelihood is that everyone else will keep their books there because they can’t afford not to (I cannot afford not to either but, well, I would rather my career collapse than put up with this) so you’ll still have lots of books.

Godspeed to those who remain.

Follow-up post is here.

Edited to add: probably too late for this to make a difference, but having to devote a lot of time to dealing with Amazon and then keeping Bluesky informed, atop hours spent trying to get Barnes & Noble to pay me, has eaten into my regular work hours. If any of this has been helpful to you, please consider buying me a ko-fi.