DRM Opt-Ins, AI Bots Reading Your Ebooks, and Options for the Future - An Informed Take

What’s Coming in This Post:
-A Research Round-Up of DRM and the Ask This Book controversy
-Some current author perspectives/choices on AI - with the pros and pitfalls
-Some choices you can consider moving forward as you’re navigating this situation

So, first off - yes, the sky is falling. This is normal for the publishing industry, especially since about 2008-2009. The publishing industry is constantly changing with the ebook revolution and the indie revolution, and now with AI, things are shifting again.

And if you’re going “again? I just want to freaking write books and get them to readers who will enjoy them!” I get it. Your feelings are valid. But also, industries do this all the time. This is why it’s crucial to own your why and make changes that make sense for you.

But also, feel free to take a breather. Because friends, it is nuts

Now, moving on.

So, Amazon did a bold, friendly announcement of the DRM change, and all authors who are using KDP received an email about it.

The other announcement was sneaked out, there were no emails to authors who use KDP, and their actual press release could be summed up like “hey, we’ve already been doing this, and we’re going to keep doing it, you cool with that? Haha, ignore the question mark, you don’t really have a say in this.”

Let’s tackle DRM first.

By the way, note that earlier tension between what readers want and what authors want. For simplicity, readers would likely want to just be able to download all ebooks or not download all ebooks. Having it be an author-by-author and book-by-book choice will likely frustrate some readers who are expecting a uniform experience from the Amazon storefront.

One takeaway from this story is that Amazon is actually giving authors some control and power, at the expense of reader choice (and potentially with some reader confusion).

Another takeaway is that if authors opt out of DRM, then readers can download their ebook files not only in epub, a pretty standard file, but also in PDF, which is more widely used in other formats.

-Some authors are concerned about people pirating their work.
-Other authors are like “um, this is already happening, what’s the big deal?”
-And other authors might be like “I’m tired of the back and forth, I’m going solo with my storefront.” Which is fair.

• Ask this Book lets you ask questions about the book you’re reading and receive spoiler-free answers.

• The feature answers questions about the plot, characters, and other relevant details.

• Ask this Book is available on the Kindle iOS app for U.S. customers and will come to Kindle devices and Android OS next year.

Remember how I said earlier that there would be tension between what readers perceive as good for them and what authors perceive as good for them? Yup, here we have it. Or at least, that’s how some of the narrative spin is going. After all, Amazon is all about user experience, and this is ostensibly meant to improve user experience of individual books by giving them a chatbot.

This presumes a few things about readers:
-Readers can’t scroll back and reread pages
-Readers might be reading so many books that they forget what is in each one
-Readers are used to chatbots, so here’s another one for them

From all the scrolling I’ve done on Facebook and Reddit, responses are mixed across the board. And the thing is, if a lot of responses are overwhelmingly negative, but a reader enjoys the idea anyway, they’ll likely just opt out of the argument and use the chatbot.

The silence of readers who might enjoy this software can just mean that a lot of people would rather read books than get involved in another online debate, no matter the level of perceived or actual importance.

Okay, let’s dive into concerns for authors:

First off - Writer Beware did an excellent summary article on this topic. Please check it out there.

-Amazon has labeled this a “software change” hardwired into Kindles and the Kindle app.
-Thus, KDP authors currently have no ability to opt out of this “software change.”
-This “software change” is a generative AI chatbot that will have access to all the ebooks in KDP.
-Amazon is a corporation that wants to make money above all else. The chances that it is acting altruistically and has no interest in using all of this data scraped from author’s books in a future endeavor is highly unlikely. And the fact is that currently Amazon has make no statement or strong promises stating that it won’t use this scraped data for other purposes, such as training its AI systems.
-Amazon sneaked this out. This is a biggie, and addressed very well in the Writer Beware post.
-The Writer Beware post points out that many publishing executives and literary agents were also unaware of this, and they also see concerning areas.
-From their lack of transparency over this “software issue” vs. Amazon’s vocal transparency over author control in DRM management, one can speculate that Amazon was hoping everyone would applaud the DRM move (“see? We believe in author rights!”) and, y’know, ignore this area over here.

Amazon is spinning this as a “simple software upgrade” to help out readers.

However, this software upgrade is in fact making use of generative AI software that Amazon is well aware that authors have mixed feelings about (to put it mildly). Amazon itself requires that authors disclose AI usage when they are about to publish a book. There is little to no chance that Amazon is acting in ignorance here.

Authors, publishing houses, and literary agents are seeing this as a rights issue. The owner of copyrighted material, such as a book, should have a right to consent to it being used for/scraped by generative AI or to opt out. This seems reasonable, and it will be interesting to see of lawsuits develop from this.

Furthermore, Amazon dominates the ebook market (one lawsuit even calls it a monopoly). Even if authors choose to remove all of their ebooks from Amazon’s system, selling ebooks widely or through a direct storefront is a much bigger marketing challenge and the authors could lose access to a significant portion of the reader market. This gives Amazon what some could perceive as an allegedly unfair leverage against authors and ability to control access to the ebook marketplace.

What Can You Do As An Author?

I’m all about choices for you, authors. And in situations like this, it can feel easy or freeing to take drastic measures or just say “I’m so done with all of this.” I get it.

So here are some choices (note that these choices are representative of arguments and choices I’ve seen online, and do not necessarily reflect my personal views):

1.) Do nothing because generative AI is here to stay, you don’t have time to worry about this, and/or you’re not threatened by this at all.

If you have zero worries about this situation, and you think the reader feature sounds cool, then go on about your day. You have that option. There is probably a lot of “technically” legal generative AI scraping going on already with books. Just embrace the machines and don’t worry at all about personal ownership or intellectual property. Words and information are just there for everyone to enjoy, and you can always write more books.

Also, if you find that even though you’re concerned about this situation, moving from Amazon or creating a whole new platform just isn’t viable for you, that’s legit too. We’re all in different places here. This is a no-judgement space.

2.) Develop some kind of hybrid approach to make as much money from your book at the start, via Kickstarter or some other exclusive approach (like serialized fiction), then widely distribute your books across platforms (or use KU).

This is an option if your concern is less about rights and more about Amazon and other distributors getting access to your books before you’ve made your money back. Keep your books exclusive, then drip them out as you choose to other storefronts.

3.) Wait and see how the Ask This Book generative AI situation plays out. It isn’t going quietly like it would seem Amazon hoped it would. There could be shifts. However, the challenge is that a lot of people in the US are on holiday breaks, making it difficult for things to happen fast. So if you’re looking for fast change or fast action, it likely won’t happen - it took Amazon 8 months to walk back the DRM issue, even after the enormous backlash from readers.