Books are one-hundred-percent AI free. No, maybe not

2 October 2026

E-books (not paper/print books) seem set to start shipping with extra AI features, akin to the bonus features that once came with film and TV DVDs:

Google recently announced a partnership with Bloomsbury, De Gruyter Brill, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan, O’Reilly Media, and Penguin Random House to enhance e-books from its Google Play store with AI, allowing readers to interact with the text of the books directly, ask questions and get answers, and develop tools such as quizzes and slideshows.

These add-ons may not be all bad. I like the idea of being able find out more about parts of a book I’m reading. There could be any number of reasons for doing this.

For instance, in Sally Rooney’s 2021 novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, two characters discuss the Late Bronze Age collapse, which occurred over three-thousand years ago. I’d not heard of it before, even though I visited ruins of the Hittite Empire, whose demised was hastened by the collapse, when I was in Türkiye. I paused reading the novel to find out more about this period of history.

Having access to this information through an e-book would save the bother of looking up a search engine. No surprise then Google wants to be at the forefront of this development.

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artificial intelligence, books, history, novels, Sally Rooney, technology