The first wave of Kindle Worlds press coverage mostly quoted from Amazon's press release with a few reaction links. Follow-up articles proved to be more critical and more aware of fannish perspective. The Millions asked Will Kindle Worlds Commodify Fan Fiction?. "It is fitting, perhaps, that the same week as the Yahoo/Tumblr acquisition, Amazon announced a project entitled 'Kindle Worlds.' It feels like more of a broader trend than a coincidence, because the Kindle Worlds endeavor is about an organization inserting itself from the top down. 'Worlds,' we learn, are Amazon-ese for fandoms."

By contrast "There is an enormously freeing diversity in the world of fan fiction. I don’t mean that the writers are diverse — they are mostly female, and surely there must be socioeconomic implications in the ability to sustain such a hobby...The possibilities spin off into exponentially increasing permutations, spurring weird stuff and beautiful stuff, quite often fiction that’s better written than the source material that inspired it, creating fandoms that are so broad and varied and encompassing that a person can usually find whatever they’re seeking within. If not, well, that person may as well just write it herself. If that’s not the most accurate reflection of the rest of the internet — the organic, cultivated internet, grown from the bottom up, with no contracts, no exchanges of cash — then I don’t know what is."

There's been a lot of talk about Kindle Worlds lately, and the OTW has received some questions about its legal implications. The OTW has long maintained that noncommercial fan fiction is fair use, and Amazon's new program does not change that in any way. It also doesn't change anything about the AO3's continued mission to provide a permanent platform for noncommercial fan fiction. (And don't forget, works on the AO3 are readable on the Kindle and other handheld platforms.)

So should fan writers put their works on Kindle Worlds? That is, of course, up to you. We believe that every author should make up their own mind about whether they want to publish their work on a particular platform. However, we also believe that every person should have a full understanding of the terms they are agreeing to by doing so. We've reviewed the information Amazon has made available to date, and have tried to explain the practical implications in this post.

While in some places fanfic writers are getting arrested, in others the concern is instead about how fans could be ruining pop culture. "Mr. Rushfield laments that fan culture is set in its ways and does not want to be challenged. I think this is an oversimplification...Yes of course, some fans will never be happy. Some fans say and do things I find shocking and disrespectful, but I think that this is a very small minority...To think that this subset of fans is the driving force behind any artistic decisions, is not giving enough credit to writers and producers in entertainment."

College newspapers are a constant source of stories on fanfiction, but The Varsity tried to take a more comprehensive look at the practice, noting that "fan fiction predates the Internet. In fact, amateur press associations, which first flourished in the early decades of the 20th century, provided a way for aspiring writers to put together and share their own magazines and works of fiction. A distribution manager or official editor would collect the magazines and letter publications and send them to other members of the association. In the 1930s, fans of science fiction magazines printed their own mimeographed or hectographed works which contained their own reviews, printed fiction, and even art."