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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.)
Future AI filter options in Libby. Image: Libby
“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.
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