OverDrive, the company behind the library ebook lending app Libby, is preparing to introduce AI content controls that will allow readers to choose whether they see AI-generated material in the app. The filters, announced in 2026, will cover AI authorship, AI-narrated audiobooks, machine translation, and AI-generated art.
Marc DeBevoise, who became OverDrive’s new CEO last week, framed the move as a way to give readers and librarians the ability to opt out of AI content while still allowing the company to pursue what he sees as beneficial applications of the technology. “We need to tell people what’s available [and] how it was created,” DeBevoise said.
Libby is available through 92,000 public libraries, schools, and universities in over 115 countries, and its catalog of more than 6 million books has been borrowed over a billion times. The app launched in 2017, though OverDrive itself has operated for 40 years, originally digitizing books for distribution on floppy disks and CD-ROMs before moving into ebook lending with libraries in the early 2000s.
The push to label AI content comes as the broader digital publishing industry faces a surge of AI-generated books. Amazon restricted self-published upload limits in 2023 to combat AI content, and Kobo’s CEO recently disclosed that the platform rejects nearly half of all self-published books over AI concerns. OverDrive does not allow direct author uploads but works with self-publishing intermediary Draft2Digital, which permits AI-generated books that have undergone “extensive human editing.”
Rather than using an AI detection tool, OverDrive is relying on publishers to self-label their works through standardized metadata — meaning the filters will only be as accurate as the labels provided. DeBevoise acknowledged AI translation can raise concerns for literary works but pointed to multilingual audiobook localization as an area where the technology could reduce costs.
Audiobooks now account for roughly half of all Libby usage despite making up only 15 percent of its catalog, a trend DeBevoise said underscores the importance of expanding audio access across languages.
Source: The Verge