Technology
Libby to Let Users Filter Out AI-Generated Books, But It Depends on Honest Labeling
The library lending app is rolling out content controls to help readers avoid AI-created material, though the system relies on publishers to mark their books correctly.
The Verge
The popular library lending app Libby is preparing to roll out controls that give readers the ability to filter out AI-generated content from their experience. The move comes as OverDrive, the company behind Libby, confronts what its newly appointed CEO Marc DeBevoise calls "the new frontier" for the platform: a deluge of artificially created books entering the digital publishing ecosystem.
What the New AI Filters Will Cover#
The filtering options will extend beyond just AI-written books. Users will be able to exclude AI-narrated audiobooks, machine-translated works, and AI-generated artwork. This represents OverDrive's attempt to give readers and librarians a degree of control over what appears in their collections, while still maintaining the app's core function of providing broad access to published material.
"We need to tell people what's available and how it was created," DeBevoise explains, suggesting that transparency about a book's origins matters to library users.
The Catch: Self-Labeling Instead of Detection#
The system has a significant limitation: instead of deploying AI detection tools to identify artificial content, OverDrive is betting on publishers to voluntarily label their works through standardized metadata formats. This approach hinges entirely on honest disclosure from the publishing industry—a gamble given the financial incentives for some publishers to obscure a book's AI origins.
This decision stands in contrast to other platforms. Amazon has restricted how many books self-published authors can upload daily due to AI spam concerns, while Kobo's CEO revealed the company rejects nearly half of all self-published submissions over suspicions of AI generation.
Why Now?#
OverDrive's vast catalog—serving 92,000 libraries worldwide with over 6 million titles—remains predominantly pre-AI. But that's changing. The company works with Draft to Digital, an intermediary that distributes self-published books across multiple platforms and permits AI-generated titles if they've undergone human editing. This arrangement creates a pipeline for synthetic content to reach Libby's shelves.
