- Google has partnered with authors to make certain paid books available through Gemini Notebook.
- With the new Expert Intelligence option, users can import certain owned titles from Play Books into Gemini Notebook.
- Users can also combine insights from multiple titles for a broader knowledge bank in a single notebook.
Using copyrighted text for training large language models has been a controversial topic for as long as AI has been a buzzword. That hasn’t stopped frontier labs from gaining access to books, including physical ones, to satisfy the ever-scaling need for pretraining data. The pursuit of high-quality human data has also led to legal troubles for AI companies, including Google, which is now looking to soften the blow by partnering with (and hopefully, rightfully paying) authors — and letting users access and imbibe their wisdom through Gemini Notebook (previously called NotebookLM).
Gemini Notebook can be an excellent tool for digesting enormous amounts of information in books, but importing books directly may involve wading through gray swamps of skirting DRM restrictions. Google is now formally opening the gates to use information and insights from copyrighted books in its research or learning pursuits. Under the banner of “Expert Intelligence,” Google is allowing users to import owned titles from Google Play Books into Gemini Notebook and use its features, such as Audio Overviews or Infographics.
