Who Owns the Story?
Access, Ownership, and the Future of Digital Reading in Indonesia
What you can read, how you can share it, and who ultimately controls it have never been neutral questions. Four Macquarie University students examine the sociopolitical forces, format politics, and AI ethics shaping digital book access in Indonesia and beyond.
Where storytelling, access, and power collide
Access to a book has never been simple. What you can read, how you can share it, who gets to own it: these have always been questions of power as much as technology.
The rise of digital publishing promised to change that. A single device could hold thousands of titles. A story written in Jakarta could reach a reader in Lagos in seconds. The barriers of print, including cost, geography, and physical availability, seemed suddenly surmountable.
But as this research demonstrates, digital books have not made access equal. They have shifted the terrain of inequality, moved the barriers, and in some cases made them harder to see. Corporate monopolies, restrictive legal frameworks, and a persistent digital divide mean that for many readers in Indonesia and across the Global South, the digital bookshelf remains out of reach.
"The technology itself could easily make reading more democratic, but in practice it has been shaped by corporate interests, showing that access is driven more by power and profit than by innovation."
This report synthesises research conducted by four Arts students from Macquarie University through the PACE program. Working directly with Poddium across one semester, Peter Turner, Avani Singh, Shun Cheng, and Kagnchanna Meas examined the forces shaping digital book access, the evolution of ebook formats, and the ethical landscape for AI in publishing. Their findings carry direct implications for how platforms like Poddium and the storytellers who depend on them should think and act.
The forces that decide who gets to read
Access to digital books is not primarily a technical problem. It is a sociopolitical one. Three interconnected forces, operating simultaneously and often invisibly, determine who can read, under what conditions, and on whose terms.
The ethics of access vs ownership
Peter Turner's analysis identifies six ethical dimensions at the heart of the access versus ownership tension. Power differences arise because ownership confers control while access confers only permission. Exclusivity versus equity emerges from the same tension: ownership rights grant legal authority to exclude, and closed commercial platforms often replicate or deepen existing inequalities rather than reducing them.
Privacy concerns arise from the data collection embedded in most digital reading systems. Authentication, behaviour tracking, and personalisation all generate reader data that can be exploited without meaningful consent. Protection concerns relate to the risk of cultural exploitation and misattribution, which are particularly acute for Indonesian literary heritage. Independence is undermined when readers depend on platform owners for continued access to content they believe they have purchased. And rights in digital settings, the least settled of the six, concern the extent to which moral and creative rights persist after a work enters a digital platform.
"What appears to be a thriving digital marketplace is a tightly controlled system in which corporate priorities take precedence over user rights and cultural access."
What Amazon's dominance means for Indonesian readers
Amazon's market position is not merely a concern for Western publishers. For Indonesian readers and writers, its dominance shapes what is available, at what price, in what format, and under what terms. The infrastructure of Indonesia's growing digital reading market has largely been built by foreign platforms whose primary accountability is to shareholders, not to Indonesian cultural values or legal norms.
The Amazon-Hachette dispute of 2014, in which Amazon manipulated book availability and shipping times to extract better commercial terms from a major publisher, illustrates what platform dominance looks like in practice. Similar dynamics play out across smaller markets where local publishers have even less leverage. Poddium has a structural opportunity to offer something different: a digital reading environment accountable to Indonesian readers, writers, and cultural institutions.
The quiet politics of PDF and EPUB
The format a book lives in shapes who can read it, on what device, and with what rights. Format choices are infrastructure choices, and infrastructure choices are political choices about who gets included and on what terms.
PDF was released by Adobe in 1993, over thirty years ago. EPUB became the declared industry standard in 2007. Both are old technology by any measure. Yet they remain dominant across virtually every reading platform in the world. Understanding why reveals something important about how institutional inertia and power dynamics operate in publishing.
PDF vs EPUB: a comparison
Released by Adobe in 1993, PDF was designed to transform text and documents into a digital form that preserved the visual layout of a printed page. Over thirty years later, it remains one of the most widely used digital formats in the world. Its dominance is partly technical, partly institutional: Google Books alone had scanned over 15 million books as PDFs by 2012, and major repositories including ARSIP in Indonesia, Project Gutenberg, and the Digital Public Library of America all rely on it. Migrating that volume of content to any new format would be prohibitively expensive.
The deeper reason PDF persists is psychological. Readers still think in pages. The rectangular shape of a physical book page remains the dominant mental model for what a book looks like, and PDF preserves that shape on screen. This familiarity has proven more durable than any purely technical argument for newer formats.
Near-universal, including native Kindle support. Works on virtually any device with a screen.
Limited. Screen reader support is inconsistent. Reflowable text is not supported; fixed layout performs poorly on small screens.
Open standard. Free to implement. No royalties or permissions required to create or read PDF files.
Print-ready documents, reference works with precise layout, archival and institutional collections.
EPUB was developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum and declared the industry standard in 2007. Unlike PDF, it was designed specifically for digital reading: its text reflows automatically to fit any screen size, it supports semantic structure for screen readers, and its open standard licensing means anyone can implement it without cost. The latest version, EPUB3, supports multimedia, audio, and enhanced accessibility metadata.
The main exception to EPUB's universality is significant: Amazon's Kindle ecosystem does not support EPUB natively. Kindle users must convert EPUB files to Amazon's proprietary AZW format, introducing friction and dependency. This is not a technical limitation but a deliberate business choice, one that illustrates how proprietary ecosystems can undermine open standards even when those standards are technically superior.
Near-universal, with the notable exception of native Kindle. Requires conversion for Amazon devices.
Strong. Native support for WCAG guidelines, screen readers, and semantic structure. EPUB3 includes built-in accessibility metadata.
Open standard. Free to implement. Actively maintained and updated by the W3C since the IDPF merger.
Long-form reading, mobile devices, accessibility-first design, and any content that needs to adapt to different screen sizes.
"A just and inclusive reading ecosystem should prioritise open standards, accessibility, cultural representation, and ethical AI integration to ensure equitable participation and empower diverse voices in digital storytelling."
The fairness argument for open formats
Both PDF and EPUB are open standards, freely licensed, and not owned by any single company. Anyone can implement software to read or create these formats without paying royalties or seeking permission. This is the foundation of the interoperability that makes these formats equitable: a reader in rural Java using a low-cost Android device can access the same EPUB file as a researcher at a well-funded university in Sydney.
Closed formats work differently. Amazon's AZW format ties readers to Amazon's device ecosystem. A book purchased from the Kindle store cannot be transferred to a non-Amazon device without conversion. The reader does not own the file; they hold a license to access it through Amazon's infrastructure. This creates a structural dependency on a foreign corporation for access to Indonesian cultural content, which is precisely the kind of dependency Poddium should be designed to avoid.
AI in publishing: opportunity, risk, and the law
Artificial intelligence is already reshaping publishing at scale. For a platform like Poddium, AI is not a future question. It is a present one, with legal and ethical dimensions that require active decisions now.
Four dimensions
Indonesian law, like most legal frameworks, does not yet have a clear answer to AI authorship. Copyright requires human creative contribution as its foundation. But what constitutes sufficient human contribution in a workflow where AI generates substantial portions of a text is genuinely contested, and different jurisdictions are arriving at different answers.
A tiered framework is emerging internationally. Works produced entirely by AI attract no copyright protection under most current frameworks, including Indonesia's Law No. 28 of 2014. AI-assisted works may be protected if sufficient human creative input is demonstrable at each stage. The challenge lies in the middle: how much human input is enough, and how should it be documented? For Poddium, the practical implication is architectural. The platform should be designed so that human creative decisions are logged, timestamped, and attributable at every stage of an AI-assisted writing process.
No Indonesian case law on AI co-authorship. Law No. 28/2014 centres on human creative contribution without defining thresholds.
US Copyright Office (2023) denied copyright to purely AI-generated works. EU AI Act establishes a risk-tiered framework for creative outputs.
User-generated works on the platform may lack copyright protection if human creative contribution is not documented at each stage.
Build backend logging for every user input: prompts, edits, structural decisions, rewrites. Create a timestamped chain of human authorship.
AI systems in publishing routinely collect user data including reading behaviour, session duration, annotation patterns, inputs, and preferences. This data is often used to train or fine-tune models, sometimes without explicit user consent. Indonesia's Law No. 27 of 2022 on personal data protection establishes a legal baseline requiring transparency, informed consent, and data minimisation. Enforcement remains inconsistent, and many users have limited awareness of what data is being collected and how it is used.
The training data question is separate but related. AI models trained on copyrighted or personal material without consent create legal and ethical liability for the platforms that deploy them. The principle is clear even when the law is not: do not train on content you do not have the right to use. Building deletion workflows into data architecture from the beginning is far easier than retrofitting them under regulatory pressure later.
Law No. 27/2022 on personal data protection. Requires transparency, informed consent, data minimisation, and right to erasure.
Models trained on copyrighted or personal material without consent create liability. Default to public domain and openly licensed sources only.
Right to be forgotten requires deletion of personal data when no longer necessary. Build deletion workflows into architecture from the start.
Implement encryption, anonymisation, and explicit consent mechanisms during development. Publish a clear data policy in plain language before launch.
When AI-generated content causes harm, including defamation, cultural misrepresentation, or copyright infringement, questions of legal responsibility become complex. Current frameworks generally place primary liability on platform operators and deployers rather than on the AI systems themselves, which have no legal personhood. Indonesia's Law No. 9 of 2023 explicitly requires AI applications to align with intellectual property protection principles under Indonesian copyright law.
A joint liability approach is recommended: developers build in safeguards, deployers establish clear user terms, and users are informed of their responsibilities. Deepfakes, disinformation, and non-consensual imagery are areas where Indonesian law is still developing. Poddium's community standards and content moderation policies should address these risks proactively, even where the law has not yet caught up.
Primarily platform operators and deployers. AI systems have no legal personhood. Criminal liability requires demonstrating human intent or negligence.
Law No. 9/2023 requires AI to respect IP. No dedicated AI liability law yet. Electronic Information Law (No. 8/2011) applies to harmful content.
Deepfakes, culturally misrepresentative AI outputs, and AI-generated content that infringes on Indonesian oral traditions or unpublished works.
Publish clear community standards before launch. Document training data provenance. Build human review into the publication workflow for AI-assisted content.
The same AI capabilities that raise risks also offer genuine, significant opportunities for equity in digital reading. Text-to-speech, automated translation, alt-text generation, and real-time captioning can make digital reading accessible to readers with disabilities, non-native readers, and communities whose languages are underrepresented in mainstream publishing, in ways that would be economically impossible to achieve through manual processes alone.
For Indonesia specifically, AI-assisted translation between Indonesian and regional languages including Javanese, Sundanese, Batak, and hundreds of others represents a transformative opportunity. Much of Indonesia's richest literary heritage exists in languages with limited digital presence. AI tools that bridge these linguistic gaps do not merely improve a product; they preserve and democratise cultural access in direct alignment with Poddium's mission. This is Poddium's highest-leverage application of AI: not as a content generator, but as an access infrastructure that extends the reach of human creativity.
Text-to-speech, screen reader optimisation, adjustable font sizes, high-contrast modes, and alt-text generation for embedded images.
AI translation between Indonesian and regional languages can bridge linguistic gaps that have historically excluded minority-language speakers from digital publishing.
AI transcription and metadata generation can make oral traditions, manuscript collections, and audio archives searchable and accessible for the first time.
Prioritise AI-powered accessibility features in the first product release. Develop a roadmap for AI translation into at least three major Indonesian regional languages.
Indonesia's regulatory trajectory
Indonesia currently has no dedicated AI law. The existing framework relies on three statutes: Law No. 27 of 2022 (personal data protection), Law No. 8 of 2011 (electronic information and transactions), and Law No. 9 of 2023 (AI ethics guidelines). These provide a foundation but were not designed with generative AI in mind and leave significant questions unanswered.
Indonesia's national AI strategy, introduced in 2020 and covering a 25-year horizon through 2045, signals the government's intention to become a global leader in ethical AI governance. In 2025, the Indonesian government announced plans to establish a formal legal framework for AI use by companies and platforms, with both civil and criminal penalties for non-compliance. Poddium should build compliance infrastructure now rather than waiting for regulation to arrive.
Five principles for building a fairer digital bookshelf
The research team distilled their comparative analysis into five operational principles. These are not abstract policy proposals. They are concrete commitments that a platform like Poddium can and should act on now, before scale makes them harder to implement.
Four students, one semester, one shared purpose
This research was produced by four undergraduate students in the ARTS3000 program at Macquarie University, a unit designed to connect Arts students with partner organisations and give them the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to real-world research, outreach, and advocacy. All four students were involved in the project's conception, analysis, and writing. Each took primary responsibility for one strand of the research.
The team extends its sincere thanks to Amin Rois Sinung Nugroho and Octa Nurhasanah at Poddium for their partnership, guidance, and for the genuinely fascinating brief that made this research both intellectually rich and practically grounded.
About the PACE Program — Professional and Community Engagement (PACE) at Macquarie University connects students with government, industry, and community partners to contribute to real-world projects as part of their degree. ARTS3000 is a third-year unit within the Faculty of Arts.
Disclaimer — This document represents student research produced as part of an academic program and should not be construed as formal legal advice. Readers are encouraged to consult qualified legal practitioners for jurisdiction-specific guidance on copyright and AI regulation in Indonesia and Australia.