Libby will filter out AI content, kind of

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

“AI is the new frontier for us,” says Marc DeBevoise, who took over as the new CEO of OverDrive last week. OverDrive is best known for the ebook lending app Libby that is available through tens of thousands of public libraries. Like the rest of the digital publishing industry, it’s poised to face massive disruption from a huge wave of AI-generated books.

To prepare for the AI onslaught, Libby is now getting ready to introduce AI content controls, allowing readers to select in the app’s settings whether they want to see AI-generated content or not. This includes not only AI authorship, but also AI-narrated audiobooks, machine translation, and AI-generated art. “We need to tell people what’s available [and] how it was created,” DeBevoise says.

With the app’s new AI filters, OverDrive tries to strike a middle ground between allowing readers and librarians to opt out of AI and embracing what DeBevoise thinks are the technology’s upsides in areas like content recommendations and localization. (Libby first introduced some AI features of its own last year to help with book discovery, and subsequently faced some backlash.)

“AI is going to add some benefits,” DeBevoise argues. “If you think about it from an access to information and content perspective, it really does feel like a positive development, as long as it’s used in the right way.”

Much of OverDrive’s history, and its catalog, precedes today’s AI challenges. The company was founded 40 years ago to digitize books for distribution on floppy disks and CD-ROMs. It first began offering ebook lending in partnership with local libraries in the early 2000s, launched Libby as a consumer-facing app in 2017, and is now working with 92,000 public libraries, schools, and universities in over 115 countries.

Participating public libraries allow their patrons to borrow ebooks through OverDrive’s Libby app for free. Libby’s catalog consists of over 6 million books, which have been borrowed over a billion times. Most of these books were published before the emergence of modern-day LLMs. “Everything before 2020 [or] 2022 is by definition not AI,” DeBevoise says. “We know for a fact that the majority of our catalog is not.”

However, that could change quickly. Amazon began restricting the number of books self-published authors can upload per day in 2023 to combat AI slop. Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn revealed last month that Kobo rejects nearly half of all self-published books over AI concerns. “We are in front of a firehose,” Tamblyn said.

OverDrive doesn’t offer authors a way to directly upload their own books the way Kobo and Amazon do. However, it does work with self-publishing intermediary Draft to Digital that also supplies 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 gone through “extensive editing from a human,” making it all but inevitable that some AI titles find their way into Libby’s catalog. Still, OverDrive decided against using an AI checker to label books as AI-generated and is instead relying on publishers self-labeling their works via standardized metadata.

DeBevoise argues that AI can ultimately help lower barriers to information access. One example: localizing audiobooks. “It’s a great opportunity for taking domestic into international and international into domestic,” he says.

OverDrive has seen huge growth for audiobooks in recent years. Despite only being 15 percent of Libby’s catalog, audiobooks are now responsible for roughly half of all usage of the app. “It is the modality of choice,” DeBevoise says.
DeBevoise still prefers audiobooks read by actual voice actors over completely synthetic machine narration. “Nothing replaces the actual human touch on those things, and it’s not that outrageously expensive to be recording audiobooks,” he says. “But I do think putting it into a dozen or 100 languages becomes cost-prohibitive.”

AI critics have noted that AI translation, especially for literary works, can be problematic as well. Libby’s new AI filters do include an option to filter out machine translation, but that only works if books are being labeled correctly.

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