No More eBooks.
I'm honestly done with 'em.
In response to the latest step in Amazon’s enshitification death-spiral - the ridiculous “Ask This Book” AI chatbot ‘feature’ on the Kindle app - I recorded a rambling 10 minute TikTok video on the subject. But I couldn’t let it go at that, so here’s a substack article in which I basically say the same things in (hopefully) a more concise manner.
In short: I’ve deleted my ebook from Amazon and have no intentions to relist it. It is now only available as a paperback. You can call it an act of protest if you want to. From my side, it’s mostly an attempt to keep the corpos from sucking up even more of my remaining shreds of sanity.
(If you bought a digital version of The Adventures of Hemera Nyx in the Galaxy of the Future! no worries - it should remain in your digital library. Delisting simply prevents new sales, at least as far as I understand it.)
The Discovery
Upon hearing that Amazon’s “Ask This Book” chatbot was being wildly erroneous in its answers to what the novels in question actually contain, I naturally wanted in on the fun. I did recently enjoy a hearty guffaw at ChatGPT’s wholly-hallucinated summary of my novel, so I was looking forward to more stupid made-up nonsense being peddled as “the future.”
Unfortunately, the “Ask This Book” option hasn’t shown up on my Kindle app. I probably wont get it - I think my phone may be too old for these AI updates. However, as I dug through options trying to find this chatbot, I discovered something actually upsetting: how my chapter list shows up in Kindle.
Frustrating doesn’t begin to cover it. This novel has been published for almost three years and I’ve just found this out? I know I’m just a hobbyist, but this is unacceptable.
Professional vs Hobbyist
Let me be clear about something: I’m not what you’d call a ‘professional’ author. Professionals have an obligation to meet their readers wherever they can find them, in any format or storefront available, with their primary distribution concerns centering around ROI and other quantifiable metrics. You know, like a professional author.
By contrast, my primary distribution concerns as a hobbyist is how much of a hassle a distribution channel is for me personally. Unfortunately, eBooks have always been a detriment to both my creative vision and my time. It’s not just a matter of having “untitled document" where chapter names should be. Take a look at how I format my “chapter/episodes” in print:
This - the whole page - is the chapter’s title. In print, this is obvious and easy to achieve. In digital, I may as well be asking for the impossible.
You wouldn’t believe the number of hours I spent with various formatting software(s) in an attempt to preserve a modicum of my vision for these “episode plates.” While those with highly-specialized knowledge and experience may say that it’s possible to preserve this formatting on an eReader, it doesn’t change the fact that I had no difficulty achieving my vision in print. Why should I invest so much more effort when I’ve already achieved the results I wanted?
Fonts are Important, Damnit!
Formatting is a vital part of my storytelling process. How the page looks is important to me. I format in real-time, even as I’m putting the first words down on the rough draft. Yes, it takes more time and leads to frustration after frustration, but that’s just part of the process of getting the visions out of my head and onto the page. (You have no idea how frustrating writing on substack is for me with no font choices.)
For the Hemera Nyx series in particular, font choices actually matter to the plot. Alien speech is translated and “displayed” inside Hemera’s helmet. I achieve this visually by switching from my preferred default font Alegreya to bold, all-caps Courier New.
Additionally, Hemera has a display inside her helmet that contains environmental data. I use this as a subtle storytelling tool. If she’s exploring an alien planet, for example, I can adjust the values to imply that the rising temperature is a slow-building crisis, or that a sudden drop in atmospheric pressure foretells a massive storm is on the way. This formatting is only achievable with an evenly-space font like Courier. Any other font turns this into a garbled pile of nonsense.
I can even use the spacing in that display to show cracks in the helmet’s glass. I think that’s pretty damn cool - and easily achievable in print with precise font use and clever spacing.
All of this work is lost in an eBook. Kindle will replace my fonts to their choice. This has cascading effects with the subsequent loss of formatting that relied on the even character spacing of Courier New. The result is a subpar replication of my vision that makes me look bad and doesn’t even tell the story as I intended.
eBooks are the Future*
I don’t mean to diminish the impact that eBooks have had on readers and the world at large. Nearly any book ever published is instantly accessible through the internet to almost anyone on the planet. That’s an incredible achievement of technology!
I also don’t mean to diminish anyone’s enjoyment of eBooks. Readers certainly benefit from their reduced price, easy of accessibility (including enhanced accessibility options like those very font changes), and not having a giant pile of books cluttering up your home. I have no doubt that eBooks are the reading choice for many, especially the most voracious for whom paper is a needless physical and financial burden.
When Kindle wiped my formatting and font work and then handed me extra-frustrating metadata assignments, I accepted it. I wanted to get readers, which meant jumping through every hoop this monopoly put in my way. It meant accepting the loss of my vision to ‘play ball.’ It meant endless hours of slamming my head on my desk trying to learn what Amazon required to accept my work in its digital network. And I did it, thinking I had no other choice. I have since been liberated from these delusions.
To be honest, I have nothing significant at stake here. While it is true that eBooks made up 66% of my sales in 2025, I only sold six copies in total. I’m not exactly running any personal financial risks by removing the eBook from distribution.
It’s also worth noting that I made far less royalties per eBook compared to print - in fact, I actually made more money from the two print copies than I did from the four digital ones. (I lowered the print price today to match the previous eBook royalty payout.)
All things considered, as a nobody with nothing at stake and a bizarre insistence on certain formatting and font choices, *eBooks are not the future - they’re just a subpar, low-paying hassle.
Conclusion
I’m just starting out on my life-long pursuit of writing and publishing. My “priviliage” at this stage (if you can call ‘no sales’ a priviliage) is that I have a choice of where, when, and how my work reaches readers.
I have no obligations to capitulate to Amazon’s increasingly insane AI obsession. I have no doubt they’ll scan, scrape, and analyze anything I upload. They’ll probably do it even if I go through IngramSpark - hell, Ingram will probably do it, too. AI scraping is inescapable as the monopolies incorporate it into every facet of their business and shove it down consumer’s throats.
All the more reason for me, then, to avoid the Kindle app outright. I want my vision in the hands of readers as I intended - fonts and all. I want readers to disconnect from digital screens and devices, even if they’re reading about digital screens and devices. I want the weight of those words to be felt in their hands. And I believe in my writing well enough that I think it deserves the extra cost and space on your shelf.
Call it what you will, but I’m done with eBooks. That may change some time in the future as my writing career grows and adapts, but for now, I’m a print-only author.
And I’m damn proud of it.