As book retailers and distributors leverage artificial intelligence to offer interactive features, publishers are reckoning with the implications.

Two prominent examples emerged last month: Amazon's "Ask this Book" feature, which launched December 11 on Kindle devices and iOS, and ElevenLabs' "VoiceChat for audiobooks," which went live on December 2. Both allow readers to query books using AI—but their approaches to rights and licensing differ sharply, highlighting tensions over who controls interactive book experiences.

Amazon's feature lets readers highlight passages or type questions into a chatbot to get "spoiler-free" answers about plot, characters, and themes. The feature, which will roll out more widely in 2026, works on thousands of English-language titles and cannot be disabled by authors or publishers.

"'Ask this Book' is designed as a reading comprehension tool for customers who have already purchased or borrowed books, providing factual information to help them better understand what they're reading, with answers that are non-shareable and non-copyable," an Amazon spokesperson told PW. The company describes it as "a natural language expansion" of existing Kindle features like search and x-ray.

The Authors Guild sharply disagrees. In a statement posted to its website on December 23, the authors' rights advocacy organization said Amazon "turns books into searchable, interactive products akin to enhanced e-books or annotated editions—a new format for which rights should be specifically negotiated."

The Guild sees the enhanced functionality—which presumably is made possible by Amazon's proprietary AI ingesting and retaining the entirety of the text in order to reply to any queries or prompts—as not falling under the parameters of existing licenses, instead calling it derivative use.

"Amazon has confirmed that it is using a 'standalone' instance of an AI model to answer user queries and that its responses are based solely on the text of the book purchased by the user," the Guild notes, pointing out that the technology may use retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technology, a growing market where applications are typically licensed.

"Amazon's 'Ask this Book' feature, while limited, is not licensed, brings in no new income, and does not allow publishers and authors to opt out, much less opt in," the Guild said. "This sets a dangerous precedent for the future of licensing for AI features, especially given Amazon's ownership of most of the e-book market."

Amazon maintains that no additional rights are needed because the feature "only uses content from the book as a prompt, and that prompt is not retained or stored to train the underlying AI model." The company added that "readers have been asking these questions through internet searches for years and that this feature is more native, spoiler-free, and helps customers keep reading."

‘A personal book club’

ElevenLabs' VoiceChat, launched on its ElevenReader app in early December, offers similar functionality, though for audiobooks. The feature lets listeners ask questions about audiobooks using voice commands, receiving AI-generated responses in one of ElevenLabs' 500 synthetic voices.

"It works a bit like having a personal book club built in—you can ask for a recap, get details about a character or plot point, or just check something you missed, and the book responds in a natural, conversational way," said Madeline Shue, who leads growth and strategy at ElevenLabs.

The feature has not attracted the same controversy, because it is limited to books published by independent authors directly on the site or content uploaded by users for listening and interaction, and not those sold or distributed on behalf of other publishers. "We wouldn't do this on a publisher's content without their consent," Shue said.

However, ElevenLabs is actively courting publishers for licensed partnerships. "We've heard from publishers that this kind of interaction could open up interesting opportunities to extend and potentially monetize their IP," Shue said. "We're ultimately interested in partnering with publishers who want to innovate here and help authors monetize this type of engagement."

The contrast underscores a pivotal question: will interactive AI features be imposed by platforms or negotiated with rightsholders? Several companies are working in stealth mode to license content specifically for query-and-chat functions, racing to build what could become the modern iteration of enhanced e-books—digital books with embedded multimedia, annotations, and interactive elements, which emerged in the early 2010s but proved expensive to produce and struggled to find audiences.

These new AI-powered features hark back to concepts like Bob Stein's SocialBook, developed at the Institute for the Future of the Book in the 2010s. Stein envisioned books as "vehicles for moving ideas in time and space" where readers could converse in live margins, transforming reading from a solitary act into a communal experience and allowing conversation to emerge from the text itself, flattening the hierarchy between authors and readers.

More recently, companies such as Fable, the online digital book club platform, have allowed for readers to ask questions of books—but in that case, answers are delivered by paid book club moderators and their fellow book club members, not by AI.

Still, controversy around tech companies' ambitions for this type of interactivity continues to simmer. The Authors Guild urged Amazon to "move to a permissioned, paid model" and said it will continue monitoring AI-enhanced books across platforms. "These are entirely new uses that fall outside of the rights granted under most publishing contracts, retail agreements, and platform terms of service," the Guild said.

Meru Gokhale, CEO of Editrix.ai and former publisher of the Penguin Press Group in India, commented on the controversy, noting that there are several more challenges this new technology poses beyond licensing, including whether or not the AI will return accurate results. She also argued that current contracts, which focus on licensing alone, are largely out of date. "Publishers have been used to thinking about AI in terms of copyright, training datasets, and licensing," Gokhale said. "Reading features sit in a different zone, they are not even a part of the conversation yet."

She reiterates another argument from the early 21st century: that if the market doesn't meet demand for a product, the user will simply bypass the market, with the result being technological mashups of content from books with AI, with no publishing industry oversight or involvement—least of all remuneration for use of the copyrighted material.

"That's why pure resistance can be self-defeating. If the paid ecosystem refuses to meet a reader expectation, the expectation won't disappear," Gokhale said. "Once you ask those questions, the posture shifts. The issue stops being 'Amazon did a thing.' The issue becomes 'the reading interface is changing, and publishing needs to be able to enter the discussion to set terms for it, to safeguard quality control.'"

For now, what we've seen in the past month represents competing approaches to this innovation in the reader interface: Amazon's unilateral deployment of AI features on its dominant platform, and ElevenLabs' partnership-oriented model that positions authors and publishers as stakeholders in the interactive future. As AI capabilities accelerate and reader expectations evolve, the question of who controls and profits from these experiences will continue to be debated and, quite likely, litigated.