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Comment by SanjayMehta | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering what Amazon is planning to do with their access to all those Kindle books.

I was curious:

• Anna’s Archive: ~61.7 million “books” (plus ~95.7M papers) as of January 2026 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive • Amazon Kindle: “over 6 million titles” as of March 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive

Hard to compare because AA contains duplicates, and the Kindle number is old, but at a glance it seems AA wins.

What do you mean 'planning'. You think they haven't already been sucked up?

What do you mean 'sucked up'? It's data on their machines already, people willingly give them the data, so Amazon can process and offer it to readers. No sucking needed, just use the data people uploaded to you already.

There's definitely a legal & contractual difference between (1) storing the books on your servers in order to provide them to end users who have purchased licenses to read them and (2) using that same data for training a model that might be used to create books that compete with the originals. I'm pretty sure that's why GP means by "sucking up."

This is analogous the difference between Gmail using search within your mail content to find messages that you are looking for vs Gmail providing ads inside Gmail based on the content of your email (which they don't do).

Yeah, I guess the "err" is on my side, I've always took "suck up" as a synonym for scraping, not just "using data for stuff".

And yeah, you're most likely right about the first, and the contract writers have with Amazon most certainly anticipates this, and includes both uses in their contract. But! Never published on Amazon, so don't know, but I'm guessing they already have the rights for doing so with what people been uploading these last few years.

They may not serve ads but you don't know they don't train their models on them.

If I still used Gmail I'd read the terms of service real close.

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