Amazon is giving Kindle readers new ways to stay immersed in books

Amazon’s Kindle e-readers have received a series of notable updates this year, focusing on enhancing the overall reading experience. This includes features such as new spacing options for characters, words, and paragraphs in e-books, as well as a new accessibility tool called Assistive Reader, which can turn your e-books into read-along audiobooks.

Recently, at its fall hardware event, Amazon unveiled its new Kindle Scribe lineup. Quietly, alongside that announcement, the e-commerce giant revealed two new AI-powered reading tools coming soon to both the Kindle iOS app and its e-readers: Story So Far and Ask This Book.

Similar to the Kindle Recaps feature Amazon introduced earlier this year, both features are designed to help readers stay connected to what they’re reading. Story So Far will help you catch up on a book you’re reading, while the Ask This Book feature will help answer questions you may have about characters or scenes in a book.

You’ll have to wait to try Amazon’s new Kindle reading features

How effective they will be remains uncertain

If you’re wondering when you’ll get the chance to try out these new AI-powered Kindle features, Amazon says they will be available first on the Kindle iOS app “later this year” and on Kindle devices “early next year.”

While you still have to wait to try these features, Amazon has explained in the meantime how they will work. As I mentioned earlier, Story So Far will help you catch up on a book you’re reading. However, it will only summarize up to the point you’ve read. So if you’re worried about using it and getting spoiled, you won’t. This feature in particular seems like it will be especially helpful for books you might have stepped away from or for titles with excessively long and complicated storylines, where a quick refresher can help you get back up to speed quickly.

Ask This Book is quite different from Story So Far. While it’s an AI-powered feature that lets you ask your book questions, it may not work exactly as you might expect. It’s not like Google Gemini or ChatGPT, where you type something in and get an answer about it. According to Amazon, “Ask this Book will let you highlight any passage of text while reading a book and get spoiler-free answers to questions about things like a character’s motive or the significance of a scene.”

To me, that doesn’t seem like you’re really asking questions; rather, you’re highlighting passages from a book you’re curious or confused about, and potentially getting an answer that may be helpful.

Of course, both Story So Far and Ask This Book are AI-powered, so whether they are actually useful or not will depend entirely on how effective and accurate Amazon’s AI engine is. However, if it’s anything like Kindle Recaps, an AI-powered summarization feature already available on Kindle e-readers and the iOS app, it could be overseen by Amazon moderators. When Kindle Recaps launched, Amazon stated that the recaps “accurately reflect book content” (via Good E Reader), so hopefully, the same will be true for both of these features.

In terms of what books you’ll be able to use Story So Far and Ask This Book on, Amazon states it will be available for “thousands of Kindle books in the US,” whether you have purchased or borrowed them. Both of Amazon’s new AI-powered Kindle features will be accessible on the Kindle iOS app later this year and on Kindle e-readers, including the new Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, early next year.