After the disappointing announcement by Amazon about their new AI 'ask this book' feature coming out in 2026, I have decided to remove my ebooks from KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) and as such they will no longer be available through Kindle Unlimited. 

For those of you unaware, Amazon's 'ask this book' feature is a new AI tool that will be implemented in all Kindles from 2026. It is a chatbot type AI which will scrape through any books requested by the user to answer questions or provide a summary of the book. There is no 'opt-out' options for authors and many, myself included, have had to make the decision to remove our books from KDP.

KDP is the platform where most indie authors publish and for most indie authors provides the bulk of the money they make off their work. However, almost every indie author I have spoken with (those that are aware that this feature will be implemented as Amazon have been very hush hush about this) have decided to remove their work from KDP rather than allow yet another AI to steal their work to build its database.

The paperback versions of my books are already published using Ingram Sparks and now my ebooks will be as well. I'm choosing to view this as a good step as publishing through Ingram and not KDP means that my ebooks can be available outside of the Kindle library, so my work will now be available to those with a Kobo or other e-reader.

For the last two months I have begun to offer epub copies of my work to whoever wants it free of charge and will continue to do so.

My stance on AI will always be that it has no place in creative spaces (I am also vehemently against AI in any space and will never use it for anything but that's a rant for another day). I will never voluntarily let my work feed these 'mediocrity machines'. AI cannot create, it can only copy, and it copies using stolen ideas. If Amazon walks this back or offers an opt-out option then there is a possibility that my work will return to KDP, however using Amazon has always left me feeling a little dirty so perhaps not, we shall see.