More and more start-ups and digital publishers are offering readers the opportunity to use artificial intelligence (AI) to interact with the content of a (mostly digital) book and obtain clarification, rephrasing, or explanation. “The book becomes a living object,” says Ahmed Kamel, head of Sinai.ai, a platform currently in the testing phase that offers more than just mere reading, the AFP agency reported.
From Listening to Dialogue: How Amazon and Tech Startups Are Turning Books into a Live Chat
With the same title, a user has access to an e-book, an audiobook, and an AI interface. Using this chatbot, they can deepen their knowledge about a character’s psychology, historical context, or a philosophical concept. The young French company My Smart Book, in turn, launched a similar application in mid-April, whose conversations, like Sinai’s, are based entirely on the contents of the books. And last fall, the audiobook giant Audible, an Amazon subsidiary, added an “Ask a Question” option to its US offering in a beta version. While listening to an audiobook, you just press a button, ask a question, hear the answer, and continue listening.
“This feature could expand the audience,” Audible explained to AFP, “and make some works more accessible and attractive” to certain users. “Ask this Book”, in turn, is proposed by the Kindle e-reader, also owned by Amazon, to “instantly answer questions regarding the story, relationships between characters, and thematic elements without disrupting the reading.” A new player in the field of AI-generated voices, the American software company ElevenLabs, has also made its mark with its product “ElevenReader Voice Chat,” “which turns any book into a conversation.”
According to the AFP agency, however, the question arises as to what place authors and publishers occupy in the economic model of this new offering. Sinai.ai assures that through a subscription or a one-time purchase, it provides access only to titles that already fall into the public domain, or those for which the consent of the author, their legal successors, or the publisher has been obtained.
iChatbook, another new player in this market, has a different approach and presents itself “not as a bookstore with books, but with concepts, ideas, and facts that intertwine with each other,” describes founder Brian Yang. Thanks to the artificial intelligence model, “we extract ideas and facts from a given work,” he says, and present them to the user, who thus gains an overview of the content without being directly exposed to it.
The Copyright Gray Zone
iChatbook is seen especially as a tool for young students, as artificial intelligence is able to formulate the content in a language that is more suitable for them. The advantage of this architecture is also that it avoids copyright issues, since there is no direct quoting of texts. Some platforms, such as Myreader, allow downloading any book without filtering those covered by copyright, and then connecting them to an artificial intelligence interface.
Google’s highly popular Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) application, which uses artificial intelligence, also does not filter titles. The same goes for BookWorm AI, a ChatGPT variant launched by developers rather than directly by OpenAI, which is clearly labeled as a “reading companion”. iChatbook boasts that it excludes protected works, while Sinai.ai does not allow the downloading of individual files.
The Sunnyvale, California-based company claims to have created a new ecosystem, a so-called “AI right,” which introduces a compensation system if the content is used for a chatbot, summary, or link. Sinai.ai claims to be in “active negotiations” with four of the five largest publishers on the US market, which are Hachette, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, and Macmillan. None of the so-called Big Five, contacted by AFP, answered questions regarding their artificial intelligence strategy.
Last December, the American author organization The Authors Guild publicly criticized Amazon in connection with the “Ask this Book” service, emphasizing that it “brings them no additional income” and does not give them the opportunity to decide whether to join it or not. “This creates a dangerous precedent for the future use of content by artificial intelligence,” the organization wrote at the time, adding that “Amazon controls a substantial part of the e-book market.”
Source: ČTK
