{"id":3000,"date":"2026-06-30T15:52:37","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T15:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=3000"},"modified":"2026-06-30T15:52:37","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T15:52:37","slug":"libby-ai-filter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=3000","title":{"rendered":"Libby will filter out AI content, kind of"},"content":{"rendered":"


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This is <\/em>Lowpass by Janko Roettgers<\/em><\/a>, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for <\/em>The Verge subscribers once a week.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cAI is the new frontier for us,\u201d says Marc DeBevoise, who took over as the new CEO of OverDrive<\/a> last week. OverDrive is best known for the ebook lending app Libby<\/a> that is available through tens of thousands of public libraries. Like the rest of the digital publishing industry, it\u2019s poised to face massive disruption from a huge wave of AI-generated books.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To prepare for the AI onslaught, Libby is now getting ready to introduce AI content controls, allowing readers to select in the app\u2019s 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. \u201cWe need to tell people what\u2019s available [and] how it was created,\u201d DeBevoise says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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With the app\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Future AI filter options in Libby.<\/figcaption>Image: Libby<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cAI is going to add some benefits,\u201d DeBevoise argues. \u201cIf you think about it from an access to information and content perspective, it really does feel like a positive development, as long as it\u2019s used in the right way.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Much of OverDrive\u2019s history, and its catalog, precedes today\u2019s 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<\/a> public libraries, schools, and universities in over 115 countries.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Participating public libraries allow their patrons to borrow ebooks through OverDrive\u2019s Libby app for free. Libby\u2019s catalog consists of over 6 million books, which have been borrowed over a billion times<\/a>. Most of these books were published before the emergence of modern-day LLMs. \u201cEverything before 2020 [or] 2022 is by definition not AI,\u201d DeBevoise says. \u201cWe know for a fact that the majority of our catalog is not.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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However, that could change quickly. Amazon began restricting<\/a> the number of books self-published authors can upload per day in 2023 to combat AI slop. Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn revealed<\/a> last month that Kobo rejects nearly half of all self-published books over AI concerns. \u201cWe are in front of a firehose,\u201d Tamblyn said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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OverDrive doesn\u2019t offer authors a way to directly upload their own books the way Kobo and Amazon do. However, it does work<\/a> 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 \u201cextensive editing from a human,\u201d making it all but inevitable that some AI titles find their way into Libby\u2019s 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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DeBevoise argues that AI can ultimately help lower barriers to information access. One example: localizing audiobooks. \u201cIt\u2019s a great opportunity for taking domestic into international and international into domestic,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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OverDrive has seen huge growth for audiobooks in recent years. Despite only being 15 percent of Libby\u2019s catalog, audiobooks are now responsible for roughly half of all usage of the app. \u201cIt is the modality of choice,\u201d DeBevoise says.
DeBevoise still prefers audiobooks read by actual voice actors over completely synthetic machine narration. \u201cNothing replaces the actual human touch on those things, and it\u2019s not that outrageously expensive to be recording audiobooks,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I do think putting it into a dozen or 100 languages becomes cost-prohibitive.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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AI critics have noted<\/a> that AI translation, especially for literary works, can be problematic as well. Libby\u2019s new AI filters do include an option to filter out machine translation, but that only works if books are being labeled correctly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Verge is concluding its weekly syndication of Lowpass this month. To keep reading Janko\u2019s newsletter every week,<\/em> subscribe here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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