Google is giving Gemini Notebook a much bigger library to work with. The company has launched Expert Intelligence, a new initiative that brings more than 100,000 ebooks from major publishers into Gemini Notebook, letting readers use books they own as grounded sources for AI-powered research, studying, and exploration.
Gemini Notebook has mostly been about bringing your own material into an AI workspace. With Expert Intelligence, Google is expanding that idea to include published books, giving users a way to ask Gemini questions about books they have purchased and receive answers based directly on the text.
Eligible ebooks purchased through Google Play Books can be added to a Gemini Notebook as a source. Once added, users can ask questions about the book or use its contents to create AI-generated materials such as infographics, Audio Overviews, and quizzes.
The bigger idea is that a book no longer has to remain a static thing you read from beginning to end. Users can combine the expertise contained in a book with their own documents, notes, and other sources inside the same notebook.
For example, a student could combine a purchased textbook with a course syllabus and lecture notes, then use Gemini Notebook to create an Audio Overview or practice quizzes for an upcoming exam. A manager could pair a management book with their own workplace information to brainstorm approaches to employee feedback or difficult conversations.
Google’s own examples also show how the feature can connect published expertise with personal information. The company describes using a book alongside journal entries or using information from a book about food and nutrition together with a photo of ingredients in a refrigerator.
The launch includes more than 100,000 books from major publishers, including Bloomsbury, De Gruyter Brill, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan Publishers, O’Reilly Media, and Penguin Random House. Google says it has also worked with more than 15 bestselling authors, including Steven Pinker, Michael Pollan, and Jennifer Wallace, to create Featured Notebooks that supplement their books with additional sources and AI-generated artifacts.
There is an important catch: users need to actually own an eligible ebook through Google Play Books to interact with its contents in Gemini Notebook. If a notebook containing a book is shared with someone else, that person will be asked to purchase their own copy before they can interact with the book’s content. Google says these controls were developed with authors and publishers.
Finding eligible books is relatively straightforward. Google Play Books will show Gemini Notebook under the Tools badge on the detail page of supported titles. The feature is available now to Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual subscribers, and people using personal Google accounts, provided Gemini Notebook, Google Play, and Google Books are enabled.
Google is also offering eligible users in the U.S. a free ebook to get started, while supplies last. The promotion is limited to users 18 and older with U.S.-based Google accounts and applies to eligible titles.
Expert Intelligence is also intended to go beyond books. Google says it plans to bring the initiative to more Google AI products, including the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search. The company also plans to support additional sources such as third-party subscriptions, business research reports, and textbooks.
That makes the current Gemini Notebook integration feel more like the beginning of a broader strategy rather than simply a new ebook feature. Instead of asking AI to summarize a book from whatever information it can find, Google is building a system where users can bring licensed, source-grounded expertise into the same workspace as their own information.
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