On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway closes out 2025 by examining Amazon’s new “Ask This Book” AI feature for Kindle and the backlash over its always-on use with no author opt-out. He reflects on a year shaped by AI controversies, including the Anthropic class action, contrasts Amazon’s approach with Spotify’s push for greater transparency, and looks at wider industry shifts, from romance’s continued dominance to the rise of Bookshop.org as a meaningful alternative for both print and e-book sales.
Listen to the Podcast: Amazon’s ‘Ask This Book’ Feature Sparks Debate as 2025 Wraps Up
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello. And welcome to the last Self-Publishing News podcast of 2025. I wanted to have a little reflect through the year, but there is still news happening. And the news this week is Amazon's introduction of its so-called Ask This Book feature, which has been causing quite a lot of controversy and upset in the indie community.
Ask This Book is an AI-generated feature for Kindle readers. It sits alongside the existing Story So Far functionality, where you go to the place you've read up to in a book, click a button, and get a little recap of what has happened so far. Ask This Book allows readers to highlight a piece of text and then literally do what it says on the tin — ask the book about that text. So this might be: what is a character's motivation? Where else have we seen this character? What have they done so far? What's a bit of background on this setting? It's the sort of thing that is of course only possible with the use of AI.
This has caused issues in the writing community, not least because — and this is the quote from Amazon — ‘to ensure a consistent reading experience, the feature is always on and there is no option for authors or publishers to opt titles out.' Not necessarily the greatest responsiveness to questions about the feature has caused people to get quite upset that choice is being taken away. A lot of authors are very pro this kind of feature and a lot are very anti, and those who don't want to be part of it don't have the option of opting out. That has caused a lot of upset, as has the perceived lack of transparency.
Spotify's Approach: A Lesson in Transparency
That perceived lack of transparency is an interesting contrast to Spotify, which takes us neatly into a couple of reflections on the year. One of the things Spotify has done is learn the lesson from exactly these kinds of controversies. Various times through the year it has introduced AI features — such as AI-generated cover art for playlists — and at first it didn't clearly state its AI policy: who would be affected, what rights might be given up, what work was being used to train such features. It responded to the backlash by very prominently displaying, on future releases of AI-related products, exactly who would be affected, what the training data would be, and specifically what it would not be. In general, Spotify's AI features have been drawing on listeners' contributions and uploads rather than those of creators themselves, and it has been at pains to make this clear. So Spotify has been introducing AI features through the year but seems to have doubled down on transparency as its way of maintaining good relations with creators.
The Anthropic Lawsuit: The Big AI Story of the Year
Obviously the big AI-related story of the year is the Anthropic lawsuit, which is now drawing to a close. The end of the calendar year and the start of the new year is around the time for people to register to be part of the class. This is a lawsuit against Anthropic that became a class action. The class involved is about half a million titles, and each of those titles is eligible for a $3,000 payout — making it a $1.5 billion lawsuit.
It is not without controversy. The actual ruling is that Anthropic breached copyright by using pirated copies of works downloaded from shadow libraries — specifically Pirate Library Mirror and Library Genesis — in order to train its Claude AI. This is a breach of copyright, and for that breach, titles in the class will be eligible for $3,000 payouts. It is a very specific finding, and therefore not necessarily a broadly useful legal precedent.
One of the things a number of people have pointed out is that this does not affect the original ruling that training an AI on works is fair use. It doesn't overturn the fair use ruling. One of the speculations — and I don't want to speculate too much — is that this opens the door for tech companies to buy a retail copy of your work, pay once at retail price, and then use it to train AI, claiming fair use. That would obviously undermine the new but nonetheless growing AI licensing market. So this is definitely something that will feature significantly in the news in 2026.
Romance: Genre of the Year Again
It hasn't all been AI. A couple of things I wanted to pick up on from the non-AI world. The first is that romance has been the genre of the year yet again — probably no surprise. Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J. Maas have for a couple of years now been the authors who have dominated the charts. Serial dark romance and fantasy romance has been the genre that readers have absolutely lapped up.
And this year, interestingly from an indie point of view, we saw Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros become the publishing sensation of the latter half of the year. That is interesting for us because it is worth noting how much of this genre's momentum has been driven by platforms like Archive of Our Own, the fanfiction website that is full of readers who absolutely devour content about their favorite characters. And we also saw a book that started life on such a platform — beginning as Harry Potter fan fiction, with all Harry Potter references stripped out before publication and the work extensively rewritten to avoid copyright issues, rather like 50 Shades of Grey, the fan fiction-to-publishing sensation of more than a decade ago. Romantic fiction is with us to stay. Interestingly, Spotify's end-of-year list noted the growing popularity of darker content — full-blown horror is breaking out of its niche and might be a genre to watch in 2026.
The Story of the Year: Bookshop.org Expands into Ebooks
And I think the story of the year for me to end with is the expansion of Bookshop.org into ebooks. Bookshop.org started — fortuitously for it — just before the pandemic. It is a site that allows people to buy books online from one central place and have a cut of sales given to a local bookshop of their choice. It doesn't have to be a bookshop near them, just one they want to support. Until this year, it had only been about print titles. But starting in the US and then moving to the UK, it has now moved into ebooks. People can buy ebooks from Bookshop.org and have those purchases support a local indie bookstore of their choice.
This makes it much easier for people who want to support independent sellers of all kinds, whether that's bookstores or creators. It is now very easy for indie writers to get their work onto Bookshop.org, especially now it's opened up to ebooks — platforms like Draft2Digital distribute directly there. This is clearly going to be a big game-changer. Over the course of this year we saw quite a significant trend of anti-corporate buying, or if you want to give it a positive spin, pro-artisanal buying. Platforms like this make it much easier for consumers to support the creators and stores they have come to know and love.
And that seems like a very happy note on which to end a look at 2025. I very much look forward to speaking to you again in 2026. Merry Christmas — I think this goes out two days after Christmas — and a very, very happy New Year.
