Hoopla, a service that provides public libraries around the country with ebooks, announced that it will do more to prevent the spread of low quality AI-generated books after a 404 Media investigation showed that they were common on its platform.
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While the exact details of the plan Hoopla is putting together to prevent low quality AI-generated books from flooding its platform are still not clear, Hoopla emailed librarians again on February 14 to share more information on actions it has already implemented. This includes revising its “collection development policy to ensure we adhere to and evolve with industry best practices,” offering librarians better ways to manage the Hoopla catalog by contacting Hoopla directly, and the removal of all “summary titles from all vendors, with some exceptions,” such as HMH Books, the publisher of the popular CliffNotes series. 404 Media also obtained a copy of this second email.

As 404 Media’s investigation into Hoopla showed, books that seemingly use AI to summarize existing, human-written books, are some of the most common low quality content on Hoopla as well as other ebooks providers, including Amazon. For example, one publisher called IRB Media had hundreds of summaries available to lend via Hoopla when I published my story on February 4. At the time of writing IRB Media still has about a dozen summaries I could find on Hoopla, but most of its books had been removed.
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“Librarians select, purchase, and lend materials in service to the public, and they put their trust in hoopla to provide a curated and high-quality catalog of materials,” Jennie Rose Halperin, executive director at Library Futures, an organization of librarians, told me in an email. “Hoopla has broken this trust in favor of a profit-motivated, exploitative model that flies in the face of professional values. This statement, which is very light on details, continues to avoid accountability for the expensive and shoddy product they are vending. Around the country, libraries are under attack by censors and book banners for simply providing access to quality resources that serve the needs of their communities, and hoopla’s model puts them further at risk. The misalignment of values between big vendors and libraries has never been clearer.”