Google Play Books will launch a generative AI Book Insights feature — their version of an in-book chatbot — which they call a “reading companion.” It will allow readers to get a recap or ask a chatbot questions about the text. Starting July 6, it will be automatically enabled for most English-language books and will be available for books in other languages in the future. Unlike Amazon’s similar “Ask this Book” feature, launched late last year without advance notice or permission, and imposed by fiat with no escape, Google’s feature is opt out. Though it’s not a lot of advance […]
AI
Storytel Launches AI Companion Feature
Storytel has launched Storytel Genie, an AI-powered discovery tool that “can explain why a specific book will resonate, help [users] pick their next story, and generate recaps when a listener has lost the thread of a story in progress.” Functions also include a chat interface, and use “leading language models from Google Gemini, OpenAI, and Anthropic with Exa’s real-time knowledge capabilities.” The tool launches for Swedish subscribers today, and will be fully availability across Sweden by July 1 and in other markets starting in August. “Storytel Genie is the most powerful set of features we’ve built and really defines the next chapter at Storytel, […]
Court Divides Authors’ Suit Against Six AI Companies
A group of authors cannot include six AI companies in one lawsuit for copyright infringement, a judge ordered. Plaintiffs John Carreyrou, Lisa Barretta, Philip Shishkin, Jane Adams, Matthew Sacks, and Michael Kochin, must sue Anthropic, Google, xAI, Perplexity, Apple, and NVIDIA as individual defendants—as those companies requested. Judge P. Casey Pitts in the Northern District of California severed the suit, noting that there was not enough commonality or evidence of a conspiracy between the tech companies to warrant joining them into one action. “Each defendant trained on a mixture of different data repositories at different times between 2020 and 2024,” the […]
US Book Show Sessions on AI, Growth
At the US Book Show ceo panel, Publishers Weekly editorial director Jonathan Segura asked executives how they are wrestling with the problem of detecting AI-generated content in manuscripts. HBG ceo Shelley didn’t reference the cancelled SHY GIRL or have a specific answer, saying that the company doesn’t have a systemic way of checking for AI authorship. He said that AI-detection programs are largely imperfect and that authors have concerns about having their work fed into such tool. He also doesn’t want to encourage a “culture of suspicion or disbelief of authors,” but said that the company has a contractual policy […]
Zoom Books Responds To Accusations of Selling Books For AI Scraping
Canadian company Zoom Books has responded to accusations that they are purchasing out of print books in bulk from bookstores to sell to AI companies for LLM training. They write in a statement to PL that the claims made in Demócrata that books purchased by Zoom Books from Spanish booksellers are being scraped for AI are “categorically false.” “To be unequivocally clear: Zoom Books does not digitize or destroy used or new books for the purpose of training AI models, nor for any other purpose,” writes the company. “Any claim or implication to the contrary is inaccurate.” They continue: “Our business […]
Canadian Company Zoom Books Is Buying Out Of Print Books For AI Scraping
Canadian company Zoom Books is buying out of print books in bulk from used bookstores all over the world to scrape them for LLM training. Multiple bookstores in Spain recently flagged unusual orders, writes Demócrata. One store, Fènix in Badalona, noted that orders focused on “Catalan non-fiction titles that had been stored for years and had practically no commercial outlet.” Demócrata notes that “stores in Germany, the USA, New Zealand, and Australia have received similar orders, some of more than a thousand books, many out of print.” Zoom Books writes on its website that it buys used books and accepts […]