Talking to your library: How AI reads your books for you

The new feature, called Expert Intelligence, lets you select books from your digital collection and upload them directly into a project space in Gemini Notebook. Once the book is added, you can ask the AI specific questions about the text, or ask it to generate new materials based on the content, such as custom reading plans, infographics, or even audio discussions that sound like podcasts. The tool works with over 100,000 titles from major publishers. To protect copyright, Google restricts access so that if you share your project, other people cannot read the book content unless they have purchased the book themselves.

This feature relies on a process called context feeding. Normally, an AI model comes with a set amount of knowledge it gained during its initial training, which is like a library it memorized before it was released. When you use a standard chatbot, you are limited to what it already knows. With this new tool, Google is giving the AI a temporary, specific library to look at that you provide. When you ask a question about one of your books, the AI looks through the digital pages you have uploaded to find relevant information. It then combines those specific facts with its general language skills to answer you. It is essentially acting as a research assistant that can read, remember, and summarize massive amounts of information instantly, provided you have already given it the correct book to study.

This shifts the role of AI from a general-purpose oracle to a specialized personal assistant. Instead of asking a generic AI for advice, you can now curate a specific group of authors and experts whose work you trust, essentially building a personal advisory team. It also creates a new path for authors and publishers to monetize their work in an AI-driven era, as the feature requires ownership of the book to unlock its full utility. As this technology expands to include academic papers and journalism, it may change how we interact with complex information, moving us from passive reading to active, guided learning.