Google brings 100,000+ publisher books into Gemini Notebook with Expert Intelligence
Google's Expert Intelligence lets Workspace users and students query over 100,000 books inside Gemini Notebook, grounded in purchased ebook text.
Full, commercially published books have always been the obvious missing piece in AI research tools. You could upload PDFs, link YouTube videos, paste web text, and connect Google Docs, but if the knowledge you needed lived inside a book you owned, you were on your own. Google has now closed that gap with Expert Intelligence, a new cross-Google initiative launching first inside Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM).
What Expert Intelligence actually does
Expert Intelligence gives Gemini Notebook access to a catalogue of 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 Workspace customers, Workspace Individual subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts can add these books as sources inside any notebook and query them directly.
Beyond the publisher catalogue, if you have already purchased a compatible ebook through Google Play Books, you can add it to a notebook and ask questions grounded in that specific text. Every response links back to the exact passage in the book, so you can verify what you are reading rather than trusting a summary.
Google has also worked with more than 15 authors, including Steven Pinker, Michael Pollan, and Jennifer Wallace, to create Featured Notebooks. These pair an author’s book with additional curated sources and pre-built artefacts, so readers can go deeper without starting from scratch. And for users 18 or older in the United States, Google is offering a free book while supplies last.
What this means in practice
The most direct use case is research and professional development. A manager working through Radical Candor, for example, can open a Gemini Notebook, add the book as a source alongside their own meeting notes or a project brief, and ask questions that draw across all of it at once. The responses are grounded in the actual text of the book, not a general summary of its ideas.
For students, the integration is equally practical. A teacher or administrator can purchase books through Google’s “Buy for Groups” feature and allocate them to students without needing to give those students full Google Play access. This is available to organisations running Google Workspace for Education Plus or the Teaching and Learning add-on.
Beyond querying, Gemini Notebook can also transform books into other formats. You can generate infographics, audio overviews, or quizzes from the content, which makes the feature genuinely useful for anyone who learns better through different formats, not just those who want to ask questions.
The rights and access model
One thing worth understanding clearly: this is not a way to read books you have not paid for. To query a purchased ebook, you must own it through Google Play Books. Books you have uploaded yourself to your Play library do not qualify. Only officially purchased titles are eligible, and publishers have to opt in to the feature. You can check whether a book you own is eligible by opening its “About the Book” page in the Play Books app and looking for a “Use with Gemini Notebook” button near the Read button.
If you share a notebook with colleagues, collaborators who want to query a book source you have added will be prompted to purchase their own copy before they can access it. The source grounding is individual, not transferable through sharing.
For Workspace admins, this feature is controlled at the organisational unit level. Users need Gemini Notebook, Google Play, and Google Books all set to on in the admin console. There is no end-user toggle.
Where this is going
Expert Intelligence launches on the Gemini Notebook web dashboard and mobile apps. Google has confirmed it will expand to the core Gemini app and AI Mode in Search, though no specific date has been given for those additions.
The longer-term plan extends well beyond ebooks. Google has signalled that Expert Intelligence will eventually include academic journal papers, news archives, technical documentation, third-party subscription content, and business research reports. The framing of “cross-Google initiative” suggests this is intended as a durable content layer across Google AI products rather than a one-off feature addition.
A practical shift for knowledge work
The original promise of tools like Gemini Notebook was always that you could ground AI responses in sources you trust rather than whatever the model was trained on. That promise becomes significantly more useful when the sources include authoritative, full-length published works rather than only documents you happen to have saved somewhere. The collaboration with publishers to build in proper rights controls is also notable: Google has designed this so that authors and publishers retain meaningful oversight rather than simply having their content absorbed.
If you regularly work with books as part of your professional practice or study, Expert Intelligence is worth checking out. The Expert Intelligence landing page is the best starting point, and the Google Play Help page covers eligibility in more detail.