Book-YAML 1.0 - An AI-native book format for machine reading
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Widespread book formats serve human readers, publishing pipelines, or pretraining scale — none serves machine-learning consumers that must audit their inputs. We present Book-YAML 1.0, a minimal book format for AI reading engines: verbatim text with per-file SHA-256 provenance, stable block identifiers enabling sentence-to-source traceability, explicit prose/verse block typing, curriculum metadata (grade, role, genre), and a language-invariant schema. Every design rule traces to a concrete production failure in the Noemica reading engine: hallucinated LLM extraction (1,135 fabricated facts), silently dropped verse content (8 books read as empty), and encoding corruption (1,431 repaired blocks). Production evidence: 39 books, ≈2.94M words across Hungarian, English, and German — 100% public domain — with 99–100% parse rates and a cross-language invariance measurement (DE↔HU Grimm pairs) that the format made possible.
Author: Popovics, Laszlo
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7210274174
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