Amazon. Ai. Agony.

And yes. So it happened. Amazing Amazon has pushed "ai" into its ebook readers.

As the website "Writers Beware" pointed out: 

Kindle’s New Gen AI-Powered “Ask This Book” Feature Raises Rights Concerns

My friend and also author Hannah Steenbock dedicated a serious rant and blog post to this and I wholeheartedly underwrite this. And we're not the only ones.

Hannah mentions leaving Amazon with her books. This is something I am going to do as well.

As Hannah wrote:

But I'm just one little indie author.

Amazon is not going to miss me. It's not even going to miss a thousand indie authors leaving them. They won't care.

They will only care if readers leave them - and that's where you come in.

That's me too. A little indie author. Amazon won't miss us, but at least that way they won't have our hard-written works to stick into their ai-trainings database. They will have to scan all the books and let an energy-devouring program 'decode' that so it can 'answer questions of readers'. This is not okay. Amazon does not ask us if we agree to them stuffing our books in an ai database. They simply steal it, as so many other ai companies do (hello, openai, looking at you, indeed).

In case you don't know, I'm not a fan of ai, which I refuse to write in capitals as I don't want to give that 'credit'. Artificial it is. Intelligent? Nope. Artificial information at best, and often enough flawed.

Now, if you own a Nook, Kobo, Onyx or other epub-reading device, this is not going to affect you in the least. If you have a Kindle, this will affect you if you like my stories. Let me help you along.

There are more places than Amazon to get your books. More and more authors are setting up their direct store. Mine is at Payhip. And on there is a page on how to put books from there on a Kindle. It may not be a surprise that this will also work with epub files bought elsewhere.

Other places where you can find my books are Smashwords, the KOBO store, the Apple book store and various other places. Of course buying direct would be great, but also from Smashwords you download a file that you own, not something you pay for and can read until Amazon decides you can't.

I don't know if my books will disappear from your kindle when I delist them. If so, I'm sorry. In that case, let me know, and we'll see what we can work out.

We fear that this move from Amazon will end up in them generating ai books, just like Spotify did when King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard left Spotify: Spotify put up ai generated music that sounded like them.

Thank you for reading this far. You may not agree but perhaps you at least understand.

- Paul