Mastodawn

David Scott Moyer 1d ago

@susankayequinn I am all for the alternatives, but there are no ads imbedded in amazon ebooks.

@farbel first, you don't know that; second, they're *already* putting chatbots in the ebooks; third, Amazon has a long long LONG history of just rolling out stuff in small batch trials to see how it floats; fourth, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was AI accidentally left in the ebook by a shitty AI enthusiast author; fifth, people have OPENLY talked about ads in ebooks FOREVER; sixth, if this is none of the above, wait a minute, that will change.

David Scott Moyer 1d ago

@susankayequinn First, I read a LOT of books on my aging kindle and have NEVER seen an ad. Second, nor have I ever seen a chatbot. Third, I don't know one single other person who has seen an ad or chatbot in an Amazon ebook. Your fourth point, I might believe, but that is not indicative of anything Amazon is doing other than allowing people to publish AI drek. Fifth, talk is talk. Sixth, everything changes, but that doesn't make your reposted meme true.

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/e-readers/amazon-adds-ai-chatbot-to-the-kindle-app-which-offers-spoiler-free-answers-about-your-ebooks

@farbel it's in the kindle app now

Amazon adds AI chatbot to the Kindle app which offers "spoiler-free" answers about your ebooks

Only on iOS for now, Android owners have to wait until 2026

Tom's Guide

@farbel Amazon isn't just "allowing people to publish AI drek" it pushes me to use their AI translators and AI narrators every time I log into the author portal. It's been using AI to summarize and then bury reviews written by humans. It's PUSHING AI SLOP everywhere. It is literally shoving its chatbots into everything.

David Scott Moyer 1d ago

@susankayequinn Interesting. When I log in, it doesn't do that. I wonder why? My reviews appear to all be there in their original format. I wonder why? I see that chatbot is an option in the app, if, for some odd reason, a reader wants to ask questions about a book instead of just reading it. I have never come across it in my reading, because I don't do that.

It's above the reviews of every book I look at on Amazon, a "summary" of what people love about the book. It's not labeled as "AI", but that's clearly what it is.

Below that are the usual reviews, they are not changed. But how many people actually read on beyond that summary?

I know people no longer review much on Amazon, either, they just hit the stars at the end of an ebook, and that's it.

I will never review on Amazon again, I use Bookwyrm now.

Clare Hooley 1d ago

@farbel @susankayequinn the search has literally turned into a chat bot on iOS. It looks like classic search but it isn’t [edit: this is taking about search within the iOS kindle app, see linked article in thread above]. Doesn’t seem to be all books it’s doing to for me, but if it’s done that you can’t turn it off. You can give feedback on the answers.

@clare_hooley I strongly encourage you not to enage the chatbots at all, definitely not "feedback" you're just helping to train the bot

Clare Hooley 1d ago

@susankayequinn @farbel sadly impossible not to engage - it’s integrated into the search function [edit: this is taking about search within the iOS kindle app, see linked article in thread above]. But yeh my only feedback is ‘turn it off’.

@clare_hooley you can change your search engine? I use Firefox/DuckDuckGo and turn off all the AI features

Clare Hooley 1d ago

@susankayequinn @farbel this is about search within the iOS kindle app - if you are in the kindle app and use search in a book, this is now a chat bot. Yes, I do know about kobo, but kindle is one where I have legacy DRM’d books that I can only access that way so…

Yeah, that looks like an AI-slopped book that hasn't been edited properly. I just spied an m-dash in the next sentence. *snicker*

@Firlefanz @susankayequinn @farbel

Hiisikoloart 1d ago

I saw a video about amazon eBooks getting edited. As in old classics getting edited to have mentions of tiktok, instagram, facebook, twitter to make them more "current" but to me it smells like advertisement shit cakes to try to get people who read books to stop by their social medias instead.

Paperbacks they can't change at least...

@hiisikoloart

Yeah, it'll get to the point that anything printed after 2024 will not be allowed in libraries.

Such a dystopian thought.

@susankayequinn @farbel

Hiisikoloart 1d ago

@Firlefanz @susankayequinn @farbel
Hopefully it wont go to that and instead libraries demand that the books they choose are provenly human made with zero AI in them.

@hiisikoloart @Firlefanz @farbel

unfortunately, there's no way to prove there's zero AI (and the erasure of truth is part of AI's intent)
https://terribleminds.com/ramble/2026/03/20/shy-girl-ai-in-writing-and-a-new-perniciousness/

Shy Girl, AI In Writing, And A New Perniciousness

I wanna talk about Cameron’s The Terminator and Carpenter’s The Thing, but first, let’s get it out of the way — If you know anything at all about me in this Current Era, it …

Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

@Firlefanz @farbel

I'm a big fan of em-dashes. They are not an AI thing — AI stole it from US. We are the source.

Chuck Wendig has it right: https://terribleminds.com/ramble/2026/03/20/shy-girl-ai-in-writing-and-a-new-perniciousness/

Shy Girl, AI In Writing, And A New Perniciousness

I wanna talk about Cameron’s The Terminator and Carpenter’s The Thing, but first, let’s get it out of the way — If you know anything at all about me in this Current Era, it …

Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

No, m-dashes are not a sure-fire way of identifying an AI, of course not. And it's absolutely unfair to authors who like using them.

I was thinking that the combination of everything, i.e. the style, the insane plug and the m-dashes, does point to LLMs and AI.

Which, yes, are a pox on this world.

Shantell Powell 1d ago

@Firlefanz @susankayequinn @farbel I regularly use em-dashes. I do not use LLMs.

@Shanmonster

I don't use AI, either.

But I also do not like m-dashes, which might make me a stupid author?

@susankayequinn @farbel

Shantell Powell 17h ago

@Firlefanz @susankayequinn @farbel I don't like periods, so I went through menopause.

David Scott Moyer 17h ago

@Shanmonster @Firlefanz @susankayequinn jajajajaja

Account has moved 1d ago

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife - and of a VPN service he can trust. That's where Nord VPN comes in.

Kathy Bryson 1d ago

@susankayequinn
Weird! Even for Spamazon!
I stopped with them just because I got tired of babysitting their shipping.
Made $10 last year off my own books - go wide, my friends, go wide!

Nick Lockwood 1d ago

@susankayequinn I don't disagree with the sentiment, but what is the Amazon connection here? Are you saying Amazon inserted this text without the Author's permission? That the same book bought elsewhere doesn't include it?

@nicklockwood Amazon has already put chatbots inside their ebooks, and the threat to put ads in ebooks is longstanding (by Amazon, it's not Kobo out here saying "hey, you know what, what if we put ads in literally every square inch of everything"). I don't know the provenance of this example — for all I know it's the author lazily using AI; or it's spoof — but I know this is where everything is headed and getting of Amazon is the right approach, and start now.

https://gmkeros.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/terry-pratchett-and-the-maggi-soup-adverts/

Josh Sutphin 1d ago

@susankayequinn Literally just yesterday I learned about Terry Pratchett's German publisher inserting soup ads into The Light Fantastic back in the 90s and I thought "oh that's so gross, surely nobody will ever do that again" 😬

Terry Pratchett and the Maggi Soup Adverts

Back in the 90s (starting with Moving Pictures) Terry Pratchett (yet to be knighted) changed his German publisher. A rather radical move in the market for someone who had been published by Heyne fo…

Stuffed Crocodile

@joshsutphin OH MY GOD

Janne Pekkala 1d ago

@susankayequinn @joshsutphin don’t know, if I break some illusion here, but for a long long time, there has been product placements in literature. Way before computer era. Probably as long as there has been entertainment books on market. (Sadly only found ai generated shit when trying to get actual link to prove this 😒)

Of course, that one is pretty obvious and sloppy, unlike those Stephen Kings Bud lights, Camels, etc in his books (just one known author to mention). Every time you read an actual product name (specially, if the hero is using it), it is pretty probably paid mention.

@jannepekkala @joshsutphin

Somehow I think product placements are different than ads because it's entirely possible the author intentionally put the product name there. I mean, I know *many* aspiring authors who loved to laden their prose with product names, and no one was paying them to do it.

spooky Ske-Lil-ton 🦇1d ago

@joshsutphin @susankayequinn that was also my first thought since I owned a book with such an ad and I remember being really confused and weirded out by it back then…
(Not sure if it was Terry Pratchett or some other book by the same publisher)

Susanne 1d ago

@Larymir @joshsutphin @susankayequinn Sometimes I feel ancient. Actually, after the war when pocket books came up, you would find an ad here and there - I remember ads for cigarettes, and yes, soup - like broth, Maggi, I think. It was a German publisher, rororo, I remember. I don't think the author was asked for permission, maybe it was somewhere in the contract. They stopped this eventually - I think once pocket books were more accepted.
This does not mean I condone A.'s behavior.

Amy Worrall 1d ago

@joshsutphin @susankayequinn heh, was going to reply with that :)

Fugue State Machine Moto 1d ago

@joshsutphin @susankayequinn Wow. And it seems Heyne Verlag (the ad vandal / publishing house) is still in operation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heyne_Verlag

I wouldn’t have thought you were allowed to piss off both Iain Banks and Terry Pratchett and still keep your book business.

Heyne Verlag - Wikipedia

@cmdrmoto @joshsutphin wow

@joshsutphin @susankayequinn

@cmdrmoto

Oh, yes, Heyne is one of Germany's biggest publishers of Fantasy, not many ways around them. They publish a LOT of translations.

I don't read Terry Pratchett in German (ugh, I hate translations, most are bad), but I remember books having ads in them myself - very clearly ads, on their own page though, not snuck into the text like Sue's example.

Those ads happened in the 1970s, for some reason. Still, I'm sure it was in the contract.

Andrew 1d ago

@joshsutphin @susankayequinn *CERVEZA CRISTAL*

Crow 1d ago

Makes me crazy that some products simply *can’t* be bought anywhere besides Amazon.

@susankayequinn Centralized ebook platforms can force unwanted revisions into books you've 'bought' with an ease that'd make heads spin at the ministry of truth. No recalls necessary, just quietly push edits. Before I stopped using amazon I saw books I'd owned for years suddenly displaying new covers - and changes to the text would have been just as easy to implement and a lot harder to catch.

@jacobcoffin as an author who's updated covers and corrected typos, I don't see a problem with this. I always found, as a reader, that I had to opt into those updates (they weren't automatic). Maybe that's changed or it's a setting that you automatically accept all updates. The only time an update was FORCED was also at my request (and it was hard to get Amazon to do it)—but I had uploaded THE WRONG BOOK for a preorder and basically everyone got the wrong book. They pushed through the right one.

@susankayequinn wait how do you think this happened?

If you don't think amazon will use their LLMs to add advertisements or adjust the politics in books under their control to match whatever libertarian or fascist leanings their leadership favors, then it doesn't seem dystopian. In that case the only place ads could come from is the writers themselves, and that's been done before.

To me, the threat is that corporates love this tech and it makes this kind of injection or revision easy for them

@jacobcoffin how do I think what happened? That I uploaded the wrong book? I was stressed and made a mistake?

I'm literally telling readers to move off Amazon in the OP... I'm not sure why you suddenly think I don't think Amazon will use LLMs... like that's literally what the post and *all my posts* are about, anti-AI, anti-corp...??

@susankayequinn I was asking about the advertisement. And I'm saying this is enabled by their centralized control over ebooks and their ability to push edits - which you said you don't have a problem with.

They can use this tech stack to promote fascism and other billionaire whims. LLMs just make it easy for them to do en mass. If you buy a book from them you don't own it, you don't even have any guarantee it'll be the same the next time you open it.

@susankayequinn if authors can push updates into already-purchased ebooks, so can amazon executives. Any guardrails meant to prevent that are just corporate policy, and thus can be changed or ignored on a whim.

@jacobcoffin I understand that — and I'm not stupid, but thanks

Bryan Haskin 1d ago

@susankayequinn I think it's important to clear up some miss information. This wasn't inserted by Amazon. The author did this intentionally. (Full disclosure, the other comments hadn't loaded on my instance yet. I am going to leave it here, but it looks like other people have brought up the same point. 😅)