Taiwan book publisher trials AI-assisted reading system at TiBE

Taipei, Feb. 3 (CNA) Linking Publishing, one of Taiwan's largest publishers, has begun trialing a system that uses AI to provide book recommendations from more than 6,000 titles, as well as in-depth interactive guides to 13 selected books, including French modernist novelist Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time."

Chen Shih-hao (陳世豪), head of the system development project, told CNA at the 2026 Taipei International Book Exhibition (TiBE) Tuesday that the publisher believed it was "impossible to resist the wave of the AI boom, so we tried to imagine and explore a potential new way of reading with the aid of AI."

Unlike AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, which can generate a wide range of responses but may include inaccurate information, "Linking AI Books" uses a closed database developed in cooperation with authors, editors and translators to ensure accuracy, according to the publisher.

Despite these efforts, she said users remained concerned about the veracity of information, with some suggesting that the system display the original passages in the books that support its responses.

She added that the system is still in the validation stage.

Doris Chen (陳芝宇), general manager of Linking Publishing, said the publisher was motivated to develop the system to make academic publications and humanities books -- the publisher's main products -- more approachable to the public.

"Today people are losing patience and can be easily daunted by a book's length and depth, so we began considering what we can do to address this," the general manager said.

"What we want to do is not to replace writers or reading, but to provide readers with a reading partner and turn reading from a one-way activity into a two-way process," Doris Chen added.