Libby will filter the content in AI, if

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“AI is our new frontier,” said Marc DeBevoise, who took over as the new CEO OverDrive last week. OverDrive is best known for its ebook rental software Libby available through tens of thousands of libraries. Like the rest of the digital publishing industry, it is about to face a major disruption from the massive AI-powered book industry.

Preparing for the AI ​​attack, Libby is now planning to introduce AI controls, allowing readers to choose in the app’s settings whether they want to see AI-generated content or not. This includes not only AI text, but also AI-narrated audiobooks, machine translation, and AI-generated art. “We need to tell people what’s there (and) how it was made,” DeBevoise says.

With the program’s new AI filters, OverDrive tries to strike a balance between allowing readers and authors to opt out of AI and embrace what DeBevoise thinks are high-tech areas like content and translation concepts. (Libby launched its AI tools last year to help find books, after all faced some difficulties.)

“AI will increase productivity,” argues DeBevoise. “When you think about it from an information acquisition and situational perspective, it sounds like a good development, as long as it’s used properly.”

Much of OverDrive’s history, and its schedule, lead to today’s AI challenges. The company was founded 40 years ago to produce books for distribution on floppy disks and CD-ROMs. It started lending ebooks in partnership with local libraries in the early 2000s, launched Libby as a consumer-focused app in 2017, and is now up and running. 92,000 public libraries, schools, and universities in more than 115 countries.

Participating libraries allow their patrons to borrow ebooks through OverDrive’s Libby app for free. Libby’s catalog contains more than 6 million books, which have been borrowed more than a billion times. Most of these books were published before the modern LLMs came out. “Anything before 2020 (or) 2022 is semantics and not AI,” says DeBevoise. “We know for a fact that most of our books are not.”

However, that could change quickly. Amazon started banning it the number of self-written books that can be downloaded every day in 2023 to counter the decline of AI. Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn to be revealed last month that Kobo rejects nearly half of all self-published books on AI challenges. “We’re in front of the firehose,” Tamblyn said.

OverDrive doesn’t offer authors a way to directly upload their books like Kobo and Amazon do. However, that it works with self-publishing intermediary Draft to Digital that also offers self-publishing books to digital book stores, including Apple Books and Google Play Books. The service allows books created by AI as long as they undergo “significant human editing,” making it inevitable that some AI titles will make their way into Libby’s catalog. However, OverDrive has decided against using an AI reviewer to label books as AI-powered and is instead relying on publishers to self-label their work through it. standard metadata.

DeBevoise argues that AI can help reduce barriers to access to information. One example: uploading local audiobooks. He said: “It is a great privilege to participate in different countries and in other countries.

OverDrive has seen significant growth in audiobooks in recent years. Although only 15 percent of Libby’s catalog, audiobooks are now responsible for nearly half of the app’s usage. “It’s a choice,” says DeBevoise.
DeBevoise still prefers audiobooks that are read by real voice actors rather than narrated by artificial machines. “There’s no substitute for that personal touch, and it’s not very expensive to record audiobooks,” he says. “But I think putting it in a dozen or 100 languages ​​would be cheaper.”

AI opponents you have noticed that AI translation, especially for literary texts, can also be difficult. Libby’s new AI filters also include the ability to filter machine translations, but this only works if books are written correctly.

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