Books by Bots | American Libraries Magazine

Books by Bots

Librarians grapple with AI-generated material in collections

By Reema Saleh | September 2, 2025

Librarian Sondra Eklund spends her time stocking books for the public library system she works for in Virginia. One of her patrons recently asked the library to acquire a children’s book about pets other than cats or dogs, so she went looking.

When she came across a book titled Rabbits: Children’s Animal Fact Book from the publisher Bold Kids, it seemed promising. Eklund hadn’t heard of Bold Kids before, but it offers nearly 500 books on Goodreads and Amazon, and its paperbacks aren’t expensive. Though the catalog showed only the book’s cover—not its interior—she put in the order, thinking, “How bad could it be?”

But when the book arrived, Eklund learned the answer: “Unbelievably bad.”

Its pages contained strangely worded sentences, some of them including made-up facts about rabbits (such as the claim that they make their own clothes). Every page of text featured the same clip art of a bunny eating a carrot. Stock photos of rabbits littered the pages, their eyes and noses disappearing into the book’s bleed.

One page inexplicably appeared twice. Another told readers, “If you’ve ever had the pleasure of feeding a rabbit, you’ve probably wondered how they reproduce. The answer is simple: They live in the wild!”

Eklund now suspects the title and others from Bold Kids, which has no website or authors associated with its books, were created by artificial intelligence (AI). To add insult to injury, the book was print-on-demand, making it nonrefundable. “My cataloger was practically purple in the face,” she says.

The experience left Eklund much more cautious when acquiring books for the library. “We’re learning by experience what to look for,” she says. “We don’t want to put our library’s name on something that’s not good.”

At the same time, her quest for quality content has been made more difficult by the surge of AI-generated books on Hoopla, Ingram, OverDrive, and other vendor platforms. While some of those books are relatively simple to sniff out, others are easier to confuse for the real deal.

Worse, some AI-generated books may contain potentially dangerous misinformation. The New York Mycological Society, for example, has warned against purchasing AI-written guides to foraging wild mushrooms: “Please only buy books of known authors and foragers; it can literally mean life or death.”

“AI has gotten good enough for some things,” Eklund says. “But writing books? Our kids deserve better.”

An AI mystery

Eklund is far from the only librarian grappling with AI issues. Last fall, Robin Bradford, a collection development librarian at a public library in Washington, accidentally bought an AI-narrated audiobook on OverDrive. Only after a patron checked it out and complained about a file-corruption issue did Bradford realize the book’s narrator was listed as “Scarlett (synthesized voice).” Looking through her library’s collection, she found more than 100 audiobook titles with the same narrator, all of them thrillers from Lukeman Literary Management.

So the audiobook narrators weren’t human. Were the authors themselves? With monikers such as Blake Pierce, Kate Bold, Molly Black, and Mia Gold, the authors appeared to have many titles to their names, but little to no social-media presence and only bare-bones websites with no substantive author bios—just a list of books written.

In an email to American Libraries, Lukeman Literary Management President Noah Lukeman responds, “Digital narrations have, for quite a while, been ubiquitous and openly accepted and carried by all major libraries and e-tailers, and embraced by major publishers” and adds, “For decades, writers from J. K. Rowling to Stephen King on down have used pseudonyms.”

Bradford also remembers that when she looked up the books’ copyright records, she found that they contained mentions of “text generated by AI.” But she’s not sure exactly what that means. “Was it 10 percent of the book? Was it 70 percent? One hundred percent? I have no idea,” she says.

In the Copyright Public Records System of the US Copyright Office (USCO), a search for “Lukeman Literary Management Ltd.” yields more than 2,000 entries. Many of them contain the notation “Material Excluded: text generated by artificial intelligence.” At least one entry, for Fatal Choice (A Sydney Best Suspense Thriller— Book One), contains a lengthy statement that reads, in part, “Approximately 60% to 80% of the writing is original and human-written. For the portions that are AI-generated, nearly 100% of what was AI-generated has been either revised, rearranged, or rewritten by a human writer.”

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Books by Bots | American Libraries Magazine

#2025 #AI #AIInBooks #AIInLibraries #America #ArtificalIntelligence #Books #Education #Health #History #Libraries #Library #Opinion #Reading #Science #Technology #UnitedStates #WrittenByAI

In the still waters
Silent and graceful, they swim
The beauty of fish

#haiku #writtenByAI