Google Turns Your Ebooks Into a Talking Study Companion
Google has launched a feature called Expert Intelligence inside Gemini Notebook, its AI-powered note-taking tool, letting users ask questions about a book and receive answers grounded directly in that book's text. The feature begins with select ebooks purchased through Google Play Books, which can now be added to Gemini Notebook and used as sources, according to 9to5Google and confirmed by PCMag.
Google announced the feature on 27 August 2026 on its official blog, in a post titled "Expert Intelligence in Gemini Notebook" (Google Blog). The next day, the trade newsletter Publishers Lunch reported that the launch involves a licensed arrangement for applying AI to individual ebooks (Publishers Lunch) — meaning Google is working with rightsholders rather than scraping texts without permission, a distinction that matters in an industry where unlicensed AI training has drawn lawsuits from authors and publishers.
Expert Intelligence does more than answer questions. Gemini Notebook can generate infographics, audio overviews and quizzes from a book to help users understand it, as reported by Publishers Lunch. An audio overview is a generated spoken summary; a quiz tests comprehension with machine-generated questions tied to the book's actual content.
Gemini Notebook is the renamed version of NotebookLM, the tool Google originally launched as an AI research assistant. Google described the rebrand, announced on 16 July 2026, as the same standalone product with deeper integration into Google's ecosystem and a secure cloud environment (Google Blog). The tool also lets users run code directly within their notebooks for data analysis.
On Google Play Books, ebooks enabled for AI tools display a "Tools" badge on the book's detail page, signalling that the features are available for that title (Google Blog). Not every ebook in the store qualifies — the rollout begins with select titles. The badge system was described in a June 2026 post about Google Play Books' "Book insights" feature.
The launch lands in the same year Google Play Books marked its 15th anniversary as a digital bookseller (Google Blog). What began as a storefront for digital reading is now also a doorway into AI-assisted engagement with the books sitting on a reader's virtual shelf.
For readers, the practical effect is straightforward: buy a qualifying ebook from Google Play Books, add it to Gemini Notebook, and start asking it questions, generating a quiz, or listening to an audio summary — all drawn from the book you own, not from the open web.
