The Kindle app for iOS has features your older Kindle doesn’t have

Amazon is doing its best to bring artificial intelligence to your reading, adding several new smart features to its popular Kindle readers. Officially announced in June 2026, the conglomerate touts its AI additions as “making it easier to stay immersed in your books” by offering free spoiler recaps and AI assistants capable of bringing context to your reading. Combined with the previous smart features of your Kindle, which allowed users to do everything from looking up descriptions to translating foreign languages, the release reflects a publishing environment that is looking for new ways to incorporate emerging technologies into your reading, whether you asked for it or not.

Unfortunately, not all readers will have access to the Kindle’s AI input. As it stands, Amazon has rolled out its new recycling features to new Kindle devices and iOS users in the US. However, the Ask this Book AI chatbot will only be available on the US version of its iOS Kindle app, for now. Kindles will receive an Ask This Book feature later this year. Similarly, both the iteration and the functionality of Ask this book are expected to come to Android applications by the end of 2026.

The additions come as Amazon pushes users toward new models of its flagship ereader. Earlier this year, the Seattle-based company announced that it would end support for its original Kindle models. To ease concerns, Kindle has assured users that their older models will continue to work. However, users will not be able to import new titles into their libraries.

In the same way, Amazon will not push its latest features to its older Kindle models. Instead, the contextual tools will only be available on Kindles released in 2024 or later. With that in mind, the phone app proves to be a useful app, allowing students to test whether AI functionality is really worth developing.

Amazon touts its new Recaps works as something like “earlier…” episodes of popular television shows. Readers can easily return to their favorite series without missing a beat with “quick starts” of previous installments, including key plot points and character development. It is important to note that these figures are spoiler-free. As someone who judges those who skimp on the back of a book, the thought of accidentally reading a summary of a book I’m about to devour sends a chill down my spine. Proceed with caution.

Readers can find out if Recaps are available for their favorite series on both their Kindle and iOS apps. If you’re using your ereader, simply visit the series page in your Kindle library and select the “View Recaps” button above the books listed. From there, select the book you’d like to restart. You can also select “View Recaps” via the three-dot menu in the upper right corner of your screen. If you’re using your phone, the same option will appear once you’ve selected and held a collection of books in your library.

A new addition to the Recaps functionality is Amazon’s Story So Far feature, which allows readers the opportunity to find spoiler-free recaps that “relevant to your current position in the story.” US users can access this feature on all Kindle Scribe devices, as well as any Kindles, Kindle Colorsofts, or Kindle Paperwhites released in 2024 or later. Readers who are married to their older Kindle products can access the upgrade through the iOS app.

It is important to note that these updates are not available for all Kindle books. To learn if your reading is included in the “thousands of best-selling English-language eBooks” that qualify for Amazon’s newest feature, look for the “Read again” button when you press and hold a book on your Kindle. To access the feature while reading your book, tap the three-dot menu in the upper-right corner of the screen.

A new AI assistant will be added to your learning experience. In its press release, Amazon says its chatbot, called Ask This Book, will quickly answer “questions about plot details, character relationships, and thematic elements without interrupting your reading.” While these answers will be tailored to your current location in the story, users can also ask the chatbot about the rest of the book. You can also ask text-specific questions by highlighting passages on your Kindle.

Ask This Book is available on the Kindle iOS app for US customers. The chatbot will be expanded to Amazon’s new Kindle devices and Android OS by the end of 2026. But not all books are suitable for the tool. To learn that your text is within the wheelhouse of Amazon’s AI instructor, simply highlight any text selection in your book, where you will see the “ask” sign in addition to features such as “highlight,” “look up,” “copy” and “note.”

Users can access the Ask this Book wizard in one of several ways. First, you can find the feature in the in-book menu of the application. You can find the chatbot from the in-book menu, or access it whenever you highlight a passage in your chosen text. From there, tap “ask” and a prompt for suggested questions will appear at the bottom of your screen. You can also type your own question in the gray space below. From there, you can interact with your book assistant just like you would with any chatbot.

Unsurprisingly, Amazon’s latest AI features have sparked controversy, as authors, publishing houses, and readers alike have criticized the conglomerate for potential copyright infringement. As the Authors Guild pointed out in a statement, Amazon did not obtain prior license approval from authors and their publishers to include their work in its chatbot feature. As the Guild argues, the addition of AI features “turns books into searchable, interactive products like enhanced ebooks or annotated editions—a new format in which rights must be directly negotiated.”

Amazon, on the other hand, responded to the Authors Guild by saying that Ask this Book “only uses the content from the book as information,” rather than training its basic LLM. Amazon also noted that the function works as a “natural language extension of the search functionality that already exists in Kindle apps and for which no license is required,” likening Ask This Book to the online search that users use across their reading programs.

As it stands, authors and publishers cannot control whether their books are included in Amazon’s discussion toolkit. In response to a publishing industry newsletter Publishers LunchAn Amazon spokesperson said the conglomerate did not offer the ability to log out of the tool to maintain a “consistent learning experience.” In addition, Amazon’s dominance in the ebook market also hinders the author’s ability to break out of this category, as Amazon holds three-quarters of the ereader market. On balance, the Authors Guild said the feature “sets a dangerous precedent for the future of licensing AI features.”

Ultimately, the debate speaks to the ongoing legal battles raging in the AI ​​universe. Will authors be compensated for their contributions to AI models? Or will it just be considered a cost of doing business in the ever-changing ebook landscape? No matter where you fall on the issue, Amazon’s latest AI features show the power that is shaping the next era of book publishing. Whether Amazon’s customers feel the benefits of AI are worth the resulting behavioral ambiguity will remain a central focus.