A new Expert Intelligence initiative brings over 100,000 Google Play Books into Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) — ask a book you own and get answers grounded in and cited back to its text, plus audio overviews, infographics, and quizzes.
2026-08-30 · by Moe Ameen
On August 27, 2026, Google announced Expert Intelligence — a cross-Google initiative meant to let you engage with trusted, licensed sources inside its AI products. The first application brings Google Play Books into Gemini Notebook, the research tool Google renamed from NotebookLM in July 2026. If you own an eligible ebook in your Play Books library, you can now add it to a notebook as a source and ask questions that return responses grounded directly in that book, with citations pointing back to the relevant passages.
At launch the feature covers more than 100,000 titles from publishers including Bloomsbury, De Gruyter Brill, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan Publishers, O'Reilly Media, and Penguin Random House. Beyond straight Q&A, you can generate the notebook's usual outputs from a book — audio overviews, infographics, and quizzes — and combine a book with your own notes and other sources in a single notebook. Because the material is licensed, you must own the title through Google Play Books to use it; collaborators on a shared notebook each need their own copy for full access.
Google framed this as the first step of a broader plan: it says Expert Intelligence will expand to the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search, and eventually add source types such as third-party subscriptions, business research reports, and textbooks. It also worked with more than 15 bestselling authors — Steven Pinker, Michael Pollan, and Jennifer Wallace among them — on curated notebooks built around their books. Availability and the exact set of eligible titles are still expanding, so confirm what's supported in your own Play Books library.
Expert Intelligence fixes the input side of book content — understanding what you own — and leaves the output side untouched. Once you've pulled a book you legally own into Gemini Notebook and mined it for the ideas that matter, you still have a notebook full of private notes, not a single publishable post. Nothing is written in your voice, nothing is shaped for a feed, and the book's text is copyrighted, so the only thing you can actually publish is your own take on it.
That handoff is exactly what [Kompozy](/) is built for. Drop your commentary — the three ideas that changed how you work, your pushback on the author's fourth chapter, your quarterly reading-list roundup — into Kompozy as a source, and it turns one insight into a repeatable series across formats: a captioned [Persona Short](/glossary/persona-shorts) of you reacting to the idea, a [Carousel](/glossary/hyperframes) that lays out the framework, a Text Post and an X thread, and a blog or newsletter for readers who want depth. Every asset is rewritten under your [Persona Brief](/glossary/persona-brief) so it reads like you rather than a book summary, and [Autopilot](/glossary/autopilot) schedules and publishes the batch across the eight social platforms plus blog and email behind a per-post review. [NotebookLM](/ai-tools/notebooklm) helps you read the book; Kompozy turns what you learned into a month of on-brand posts — without republishing a word you don't own.
A Google initiative announced August 27, 2026 that lets you use trusted, licensed sources inside its AI products. The first version brings more than 100,000 Google Play Books into Gemini Notebook (the tool formerly called NotebookLM): add a book you own as a source and ask questions answered with responses grounded in — and cited back to — that book.
Yes. You must own the eligible title through your Google Play Books library to add it as a source, and collaborators on a shared notebook each need their own copy for full access. It works only with participating publishers’ titles — over 100,000 at launch, from Penguin Random House, Macmillan, O’Reilly Media, Bloomsbury, and others.
No — and you should not try to republish the book’s text, which is copyrighted. Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) is a private research tool: it produces notes, cited answers, audio overviews, and quizzes for your own study, with no scheduling or social publishing. To turn your own takeaways and commentary into posts across platforms, pair it with a content engine like Kompozy.
No. Since March 2026 you could upload your own EPUB files as sources. Expert Intelligence is different: it connects licensed, publisher-provided ebooks you have purchased in Google Play Books directly into the notebook, with grounded citations back to the official text.