Google Gemini Notebook adds hundreds of free textbooks from OpenStax, S Chand and more as cited sources

Background and pain point

Students studying with AI worry about two things: answers that don't match the course textbook, and no source to check them against. Feeding a whole textbook to a general chatbot also runs into copyright and file-format limits. On Aug 27 Google launched Expert Intelligence, letting people add ebooks bought on Google Play Books into Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM), starting with more than 100,000 titles. On Oct 29 Google's blog and the @Gemini_Notebook account extended that to course textbooks, at no charge.

How it works

The feature relies on Gemini Notebook's source-grounded design: once a textbook is added as a source, every answer draws only on it, with inline citations and direct links back to the original text. From there the textbook can be turned into study guides, practice quizzes, flashcards and more. Launch providers are OpenStax, Open Textbook Library and S Chand Publishing in the U.S. and India; the first two focus on open textbooks. The blog says hundreds of textbooks; Google VP Josh Woodward, who leads Google Labs and the Gemini app, said in his own X post that there are over 700.

Benchmarks and results

This is a product feature update. Google has not published accuracy figures or evaluation scores, nor the full title list or subject breakdown.

For developers and users

Open Gemini Notebook, create or open a notebook, choose Add sources, then Textbooks to browse the catalog, and add a book to start asking questions. It works well for chapter-by-chapter self-testing, condensing a chapter into review notes, or putting a textbook next to your own lecture notes in one notebook. Teams building education AI products can note the open-textbooks-plus-citations model, which avoids copyright problems and keeps answers checkable.