Google is turning your ebook library into a personal AI research assistant. The company’s Gemini Notebook app just launched a feature called Expert Intelligence that lets you connect purchased Google Play Books titles directly into the note-taking tool, then interrogate them like you would a human expert. Ask questions, get the AI to build an infographic, generate a podcast, or draft a plan based on what’s actually inside the book.
Steven Johnson, Google Labs editorial director, showed The Verge how the system can transform Michael Pollan’s Food Rules into a custom recipe book, or apply Kim Scott’s management principles from Radical Candor to a specific workplace conflict. More than 100,000 titles from publishers like Penguin Random House, Macmillan, O’Reilly Media, and Johns Hopkins University Press are compatible at launch. Google also partnered with 15 authors — Pollan, Scott, Steven Pinker, and Jennifer Wallace among them — to build Featured Notebooks with extra source material and personal intro letters.
Johnson frames the pitch around curation. “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,” he said. It’s a compelling angle — but the real test is whether authors and publishers see meaningful revenue from a feature that lets one purchase power unlimited AI interactions.
The company built gating into shared notebooks. If you share a Notebook containing a purchased title, recipients who don’t own the book see it listed as a source but can’t access the full text or any AI-generated content tied to it. Clicking the source pushes them to Google Play Books. Google plans to roll Expert Intelligence into AI Mode in Search and the standalone Gemini app, with future support for scholarly articles, magazines, and newspapers. That broader expansion could put Google in direct competition with tools like NotebookLM’s existing web-source features, but with a crucial difference: licensed, paywalled content that publishers actually control.
