Amazon added Recaps to the Kindle app to solve a problem every series reader has: you open book four eighteen months after finishing book three, and the first thing you need is not chapter one. It is a reminder of where everybody was when you left them. Recaps gives you that, as a short summary of the previous books in the series, before you start reading.
It is a good idea, well executed, and narrower than it first looks. This page explains what it covers, the three separate boundaries it stops at, and what the same job looks like for a book that falls outside all of them.
Recaps is a summary of the earlier books in a series, shown when you open a later one. It is meant to be read once, at the start, and then forgotten about. The value is exactly the value of a "previously on" card before a television episode: it is not new information, it is information you had and no longer hold, and being handed it saves you an evening of skimming a book you have already read.
Amazon generates it from books in its own catalogue, for series it has linked together, and shows it inside its own reading app. Every part of that sentence is a boundary, and they are worth taking one at a time, because a reader who hits one of them usually assumes they have hit a bug.
The first boundary is the store. Recaps is built for books bought from Amazon. A DRM-free EPUB from a publisher’s own shop, a library loan, an indie title sold direct, a file you side-loaded years ago — all of those are outside it, in the ordinary way that a platform feature is available where the platform is.
The second is the app. Recaps arrived in the Kindle app rather than on the e-ink devices, which surprises people who assume a Kindle feature means the Kindle in their hand. If you read on a Paperwhite you may not have met it at all.
The third is the quietest and catches the most people: the series has to be one Amazon has recognised as a series and generated a recap for. Plenty have not been. A trilogy from a small press, a long-running series with inconsistent metadata, a set of books that are connected but not numbered — these can sit in your Amazon library, bought and paid for, with no recap behind them.
It is one of the first things people ask, and the answer is yes: Recaps is machine-written from the text of the books, with human review. That fact is treated as the headline far more often than it deserves. A summary of a book you have already read does not need to be literature; it needs to be accurate about who was where and what they wanted, and a model reading the actual text is a reasonable way to get that.
The interesting question is not whether a machine wrote it. It is what the machine was allowed to read. And a recap generated from the finished series has read the ending.
A character entry can be written carefully enough to say who someone is without saying what they become. A recap cannot dodge as easily, because a recap is a plot summary, and the plot is the thing with the spoilers in it. Summarise three books for someone about to read the fourth and you are one careless sentence away from the twist at the end of the third.
That is manageable when you are between books, which is the case Recaps is designed for. It stops being manageable in the case people actually find themselves in most often: halfway through, not between. You put a book down at chapter nineteen, came back in March, and what you need is a recap of the nineteen chapters you read — not of the book, and certainly not of the series.
No recap built from finished books can give you that, because the unit it works in is the book. To end a summary at chapter nineteen, something has to know that chapter nineteen is where you are.
Inkspell starts from your bookmark rather than from your library. You upload an EPUB you already own — any shop, any library, any series Amazon never linked — and it writes the story so far, ending exactly where you stopped reading rather than at the last page of the previous book.
The same rule governs everything else it builds. A character’s biography is written from the chapters behind your bookmark and no further. The relationship map shows the alliances that exist as far as you have got. Move the bookmark forward and more appears. Nothing is written and then hidden; it is written from a book that, as far as the entry is concerned, is not finished yet.
For a series, sagas link the books together so that book four remembers book one — which is the job Recaps does, done from the file rather than from a catalogue, and stopped at your bookmark rather than at a volume boundary.
One thing it is not: a bookstore. Inkspell sells no titles, supplies no files and has no catalogue. You bring a book you already own, which is the only arrangement that makes sense for a tool whose whole job is to remember something you are in the middle of.
If your series all come from one store, that store has linked them, and you read in its app, use what is already there — it is free with the book and it is good. This is for the reader who went looking for a recap and found the feature greyed out, missing, or built for a book they did not buy there.
Get Inkspell on Google Play, or read why X-Ray stops at the Kindle store — the same boundary, around the other Amazon feature readers want and cannot have.