Libby will filter the AI ​​content, sort of

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“AI is the new frontier for us,” says Marc Debevoise, who has taken over as the company’s new CEO. Overdrive Last week. OverDrive is best known for its eBook lending app Libyan It is available through tens of thousands of public libraries. Like the rest of the digital publishing industry, it is poised to face massive disruption from a huge wave of books generated by artificial intelligence.

To prepare for the AI ​​onslaught, Libby is now preparing to introduce AI content controls, allowing readers to choose in the app settings whether or not they want to see AI-generated content. This includes not only AI authorship, but also AI-narrated audiobooks, machine translation, and AI-generated art. “We need to tell people what is available (and) how it was created,” Debevoise says.

With the app’s new AI filters, OverDrive is trying to find a middle ground between letting readers and librarians opt out of AI and embracing what DeBevoise believes are the positives of the technology in areas like content recommendations and localization. (Libby debuted some of its AI features last year to help with book discovery, and then… I faced some backlash.)

“AI will add some benefits,” Debevoise says. “If you think about it from the perspective of access to information and content, it’s a really positive development, as long as it’s used in the right way.”

Much of OverDrive’s history and catalog predates today’s AI challenges. The company was founded 40 years ago to digitize books for distribution on floppy disks and CDs. It first began offering e-book lending in partnership with local libraries in the early 2000s, launched Libby as a consumer-facing app in 2017, and now works with 92000 Public libraries, schools and universities in more than 115 countries.

Participating public libraries allow patrons to borrow e-books through OverDrive’s Libby app for free. Libby’s catalog consists of more than 6 million books on loan More than a billion times. Most of these books were published before the advent of the modern-day MBA. “Everything before 2020 (or) 2022 is not AI by definition,” Debevoise says. “We know for a fact that the majority of our catalog is not like that.”

However, that could change quickly. Amazon is starting to restrict How many books self-published authors can upload daily in 2023 to combat AI slowdown. Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn open Last month, Kobo rejected nearly half of all self-published books due to AI concerns. “We’re in front of a firehose,” Tamblyn said.

OverDrive doesn’t offer authors a way to upload their books directly the way Kobo and Amazon do. However, it is It doesn’t work With self-publishing broker Draft to Digital also providing self-published books to most digital storefronts, including Apple Books and Google Play Books. The service allows AI-generated books as long as they have undergone “extensive human editing,” making it inevitable that some AI titles will find their way into Libby’s catalogue. However, OverDrive has decided not to use an AI checker to label books as AI-generated, and instead relies on publishers self-tagging their work via… Standardized metadata.

Debevoise believes that AI could ultimately help reduce barriers to accessing information. One example: localization of audiobooks. “It is a great opportunity to move from the local level to the international level and from the international level to the local level,” he says.

OverDrive has seen tremendous growth for audiobooks in recent years. Although they represent only 15 percent of Libby’s catalog, audiobooks are now responsible for nearly half of the app’s total usage. “It’s a method of choice,” Debevoise says.
DeBevoise still prefers audiobooks read by real voice actors to entirely artificial robotic narration. “Nothing replaces the actual human touch on those things, and recording audiobooks isn’t very expensive,” he says. “But I think it becomes very expensive to publish it in dozens or 100 languages.”

Critics of artificial intelligence And I noticed Translating AI, especially to literary works, can also be problematic. Libby’s new AI filters include an option to filter out machine translation, but this only works if the books are categorized correctly.

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