If you are trying to learn something new for work, Gemini Notebook can now hand you the textbook. On 29 October, Google announced that students can access hundreds of textbooks from providers in the US and India, including OpenStax, the Open Textbook Library and S. Chand Publishing, right inside Gemini Notebook and at no charge. Gemini Notebook is the tool many people still know as NotebookLM, which Google renamed earlier this year.
What Google added
The new catalog sits in the same place as your other sources. Google's post describes it as an extension of Expert Intelligence, a Google-wide effort introduced in September to connect its AI products with trusted sources, which already lets you add eligible ebooks you bought from Google Play Books. The difference here is that the textbooks are free to add. Android Authority reports that the catalog includes a search bar and filters for topic and education level, that the rollout has started for users in the US and India, and that Google has not said anything about other regions yet.
Where the books come from
The three providers Google named are worth knowing:
- OpenStax, a nonprofit education initiative of Rice University that publishes free, openly licensed college textbooks. It says its books have been used by 43.3 million students.
- The Open Textbook Library, an online catalog of openly licensed textbooks hosted by the Open Education Network at the University of Minnesota. It passed 1,000 titles in 2022.
- S. Chand Publishing, the publishing arm of the S. Chand group, founded in Delhi in 1939, which publishes school, university and exam-preparation books.
Two of the three are open-licence publishers, which means their books are already free to read, copy and adapt. That choice matters. Android Authority points out that free, openly licensed sources sidestep the copyright disputes Google has faced from authors and publishers over books allegedly used for AI training. For you, it means the main new thing is convenience: the books arrive inside the tool with search, filters and citations already set up.
Google describes the catalog as hundreds of textbooks and has not published a full list, so the simplest way to see what is there is to open the catalog and search for the subject you need.
How to add a textbook
Google's instructions are short:
- Open a notebook in Gemini Notebook.
- Select Add sources.
- Choose Textbooks to see the catalog, then filter or search and add the book you want.
Why the cited answers matter
Google says that once you add a textbook, every answer is grounded directly in it, with inline citations and direct links back to the original source. That changes how much you can trust the answers. If a summary of a statistics chapter sounds off, you can click through and read the exact passage it came from. Gemini Notebook can also turn textbook content into study guides, practice quizzes and flashcards, so you get exercises that use the book's own material.
Citations reduce the risk of made-up answers, but they do not remove it. A summary can still stretch what a passage says, so for anything you will rely on at work, such as a formula, a definition or a legal or medical point, open the cited page and read it yourself.
Google's announcement talks about students, and the same setup works for anyone who wants to pick up a subject they skipped at university. Our honest view is that this is one of the better uses of AI for learning so far, because the answers come with a page reference you can check.
Four prompts to try
Once a textbook is in your notebook, these prompts are a good start:
- "Explain chapter 2 for a marketer with ten minutes to spare."
- "Quiz me with ten questions on this chapter and tell me which page to reread for each one I get wrong."
- "Turn every key term in this chapter into a flashcard."
- "Give me one exercise from this chapter that uses a real problem from my job," followed by a short description of that problem.
What to do this week
If you are in the US or India, open Gemini Notebook, add one textbook on a skill your job keeps asking for, and ask for a ten-question quiz on chapter one. If the catalog has not reached your account yet, you can still add your own documents as sources and use the same prompts. For more on how Gemini Notebook now works inside Gemini chat, read our piece on Gemini Notebook inside Gemini, and for the basics, see the Gemini guide in Learn.