Google just gave its AI note-taking app a memory upgrade that pulls straight from your bookshelf. Gemini Notebook can now tap the books you’ve bought on Google Play Books, according to The Verge AI, through a new feature called “Expert Intelligence.” The Verge AI reports that the tool lets you bring purchased titles directly into Notebook, then ask questions, build plans, and spin up other formats from what’s inside them.
This is significant because it turns a static ebook into something you can actually talk to. Instead of flipping pages to find one management tip or recipe idea, you ask, and the book answers.
What Expert Intelligence actually does
- Pulls from books you own. You bring titles from Google Play Books into Gemini Notebook and query the material directly. During a briefing with The Verge, Google Labs editorial director Steven Johnson showed the app generating a recipe book from Michael Pollan’s Food Rules.
- Applies a book’s ideas to your problem. In another demo, Notebook used Kim Scott’s Radical Candor to answer a question about handling a tough conversation with an employee. That’s the shift here: the book becomes an advisor, not just a source.
- Generates multiple formats. From a book’s contents, you can create plans, infographics, and even AI podcasts. You can also read the full text of the title inside Notebook.
- Featured Notebooks from real authors. Google worked with 15 authors, including Pollan, Scott, Steven Pinker, and Jennifer Wallace, to build custom Notebooks with extra source material, intro letters, and more.
What’s available at launch
More than 100,000 books support Expert Intelligence to start, from publishers like Penguin Random House, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan Publishers, and O’Reilly Media. You’ll know a title qualifies when “Gemini Notebook” shows up under the “Tools” badge in Google Play Books.
Johnson framed the bigger vision like this: “I’m really interested in the idea of building a collection of people whose work you really value, and kind of creating your own dream team of advisors that are just available to you wherever you go.”
The catch: you have to own the book
Google built guardrails so nobody reads through you. If you share a Notebook that includes a purchased book, someone who doesn’t own that title sees it listed as a source but can’t view the full text or anything drawn from it. Clicking the source sends them to Google Play Books to buy it.
That design is deliberate. “We want to be able to create a space where users can bring whatever knowledge, whatever expertise they think is going to be most relevant and do it in a way that creates new revenue possibilities for authors and publishers as well,” Johnson says. It’s a smart move. Publishers have been wary of AI eating their content, and tying access to a purchase gives them a reason to opt in.
Why it matters and what’s next
What stands out here is the model. Most AI tools train on text quietly and hope nobody sues. Google is doing the opposite, gating access behind ownership and pitching a fresh revenue stream to rightsholders. If it works, it could become a template for how AI companies license professional content instead of scraping it.
Google isn’t stopping at books. The Verge AI reports the company plans to bring Expert Intelligence to AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, both of which already read from Gemini Notebook. Johnson also said the feature will eventually expand to scholarly articles, magazines, and newspapers.
The direction is clear: your paid library, whatever form it takes, becomes a set of advisors you can question on demand. For a fuller look at the demos and rollout, check the original report at The Verge AI.