About bookpact.ai

Born from inside the industry

Books are currently being used worldwide at scale for AI training, evaluation, and new applications, often without permission and without compensation to authors or publishers. That is the problem Bookpact.ai was built to solve.

Bookpact.ai is founded for and by the book industry: publishers and professionals who understand the value of books, the importance of copyright, and the responsibilities that come with it. We believe creators should be rewarded for their work.

Our mission is to build a licensing infrastructure that works for everyone. Bookpact.ai provides a solution for AI companies to establish agreements in a structured and scalable way, with documented consent, clear licensing terms, and demonstrable compensation to rights holders. For publishers and authors, this means there is now an infrastructure that enables them to actively decide whether and how their work is used.

European focus

The European AI Act introduces new legal requirements for AI companies operating in Europe. They must now document their training data, respect copyright and demonstrate rights clearance.

Bookpact.ai enables them to operate within this framework, and gives rights holders the ability to make agreements at title level with the leverage of a collective behind them.

We welcome all interested publishers and are actively expanding our catalogue and partnerships, with the goal of making Bookpact.ai the AI infrastructure for books across Europe.

Abstract map of Europe, showing an orange dot to indicate the Dutch roots of bookpact.ai

Our team

Sander Ruys

Founder

Sander has been a publisher for seventeen years, running Maven Publishing and serving on the board of the Dutch Publishers Association. He was already exploring the intersection of books and AI before Bookpact.ai existed, which is largely why it does.

Lydia Busstra

Chief marketing

Lydia has spent twenty years in commercial roles in the book industry, and has shaped the commercial and online strategy at Maven Publishing over the past twelve years. She has been involved with Bookpact.ai from the very beginning and is responsible for marketing and communications.

Taeke Kuyvenhoven

Publisher partnerships

Taeke started in publishing at Wolters Kluwer before spending twenty years building Liones and Fonto alongside Jan. That journey, from publisher to infrastructure builder, is exactly the ground Bookpact.ai stands on.

Jan Benedictus

AI Partnerships

Twenty-five years building digital publishing infrastructure gave Jan a precise understanding of how content value gets created, and how rarely it gets protected. At Bookpact.ai he focuses on building relationships with AI companies.

Bert Willems

Technology

Bert spent eleven years as CTO of Fonto, building technical infrastructure for publishers and enterprises managing structured content at scale. At Bookpact.ai he builds the platform, making sure the infrastructure is as trustworthy as the deals it carries.

Youri Bosselaar

Design & UX

Youri has spent over a decade designing digital products and brands, including the editing tools that publishers themselves work in. At Bookpact.ai he makes a complex landscape feel clear and coherent.

Byou Broekhuizen

AI Operations

Byou learned AI by building with it. At Maven Publishing she grew from an operations role into building the internal AI tools the team now uses every day, without a technical background to start from. At Bookpact.ai she runs AI operations.

Born from inside the industry

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