Google Has Just Made 100,000 Books Conversational. I Think Publishing Should Pay Attention
I have spent a lot of time over the past few months trying to explain something that becomes much easier to understand once somebody actually experiences it.
A book does not necessarily have to stop at the final page anymore.
The reader can ask a question. They can take something the author has explained and explore how it applies to their own situation. They can return to an idea three months later when they actually need it, rather than trying to remember which chapter it appeared in.
Until fairly recently, that still felt like a relatively specialist idea.
Yesterday Google made it considerably less specialist.
Google has launched something called Expert Intelligence, beginning with more than 100,000 English-language books from publishers including Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Bloomsbury, O'Reilly Media and Johns Hopkins University Press.
If somebody owns an eligible ebook through Google Play Books, they can now add that book directly into Gemini Notebook and start interacting with it.
They can ask questions and receive answers grounded directly in the book. They can generate quizzes, infographics and audio overviews. They can combine the book with other information and ask the AI to work across both.
That last part is where I think this becomes particularly interesting.
Google gives an example using Kim Scott's Radical Candor. A manager could take the thinking from the book and use Gemini Notebook to explore how it might apply when they need to give somebody difficult feedback.
Another example combines Dr Mary Claire Haver's The New Menopause with somebody's own journal entries.
A third takes Michael Pollan's Food Rules and combines it with a photograph of the food somebody has in their fridge to help them think about a family meal plan.
This is the shift I have been interested in.
The book is still the source.
The author's expertise is still the intellectual foundation.
The reader is no longer restricted to consuming that expertise in exactly the sequence and format in which it was originally published.
They can begin working with it.
There is another part of Google's announcement that I think is particularly important because it deals with one of the uncomfortable questions around AI and books.
The reader has to own the book.
Google says it worked with authors and publishers to develop controls around Expert Intelligence. To interact with an eligible title in Gemini Notebook, the reader needs to have purchased it through Google Play Books.
If I create a notebook around a book and then share that notebook with you, my ownership does not give you access to the book. If you want to interact with it, you will be prompted to buy your own copy. Otherwise the book remains unavailable inside your version of the notebook.
I find that significant.
One of the questions I have been wrestling with while writing the AI Book Companion™ Field Guide is when an AI experience around a book begins to become a substitute for the book itself.
It is quite easy to create something technically impressive that accidentally removes the reason for somebody to buy or read the author's work.
Give an AI enough access and it can summarise everything.
It can extract every framework.
It can produce a condensed version.
It can answer the question, "Tell me everything useful in this book so I don't have to read it."
That may be convenient for the reader, but I am not convinced it creates a particularly healthy future for authors.
Google appears to have recognised the same tension.
The interactive experience sits after ownership, rather than replacing it.
That is quite a different proposition.
The other thing I find interesting is that Google has not simply built this from whatever Gemini happens to know about a book.
The book itself becomes the source.
Answers can therefore be grounded against the actual text with citations.
For an expert author, that distinction matters enormously.
If somebody asks a general AI model what Wendy Kier thinks about AI Book Companions™, it may assemble an answer from whatever information it can find, combine that with general knowledge about AI and produce something that sounds perfectly plausible.
That is not the same as working from my actual intellectual property.
Once the source is governed, we can begin to think much more carefully about provenance.
Where did this idea come from?
Is this actually what the author teaches?
Can the reader see where it appears in the source?
Has the AI inferred something the author never said?
Those questions become more important as the conversation feels increasingly natural.
This is also where I think there is still a meaningful distinction between Google's Expert Intelligence and what I mean by an AI Book Companion™.
Google is creating infrastructure.
It can make a very large number of books interactive.
An AI Book Companion™ is deliberately much narrower.
It is designed around one author's intellectual property and one particular book. It can include decisions about methodology, language, voice, reader journey, boundaries, sensitive subjects, what the Companion is allowed to infer and what it should never present as though the author said it.
Those things take human judgement.
Scale is not necessarily the point.
Still, I would be foolish to look at Google's announcement and pretend it does not matter enormously to the category I have been working in.
A company the size of Google has spent months talking to authors and publishers about how people might use AI to get more from books.
It has concluded that readers should be able to question books.
It has concluded that those conversations should be grounded in the original source.
It has concluded that readers will want to combine an author's expertise with their own circumstances.
And it has concluded that copyright, ownership and commercial access need to be designed into the experience.
That is quite a lot of validation in one product announcement.
There is another detail that may prove even more important over time.
Google says books are only the beginning.
Expert Intelligence is expected to move into the Gemini app and eventually into Google's AI Mode in Search. Google also plans to add other licensed information sources, including third-party subscriptions, business research and textbooks.
If that happens, we are moving towards a world where people do not simply search for information.
They bring trusted intellectual property into the conversation and ask AI to work with it.
For authors, I think that changes the value of the book rather than diminishing it.
The book becomes a verified source of expertise.
The question for publishing is going to be what sort of experience we build around that source, who controls it, how authors participate commercially and how much of the author's own way of thinking survives when their work becomes conversational.
Those are questions we are only beginning to answer.
But the idea that readers will talk to books has just moved a considerable distance closer to becoming ordinary.
Three Key Insights
1. Interactive books are moving into mainstream publishing infrastructure. Google has launched Expert Intelligence with more than 100,000 books from several of the world's major publishers.
2. Google has linked AI interaction to ownership. A reader needs an eligible Google Play Books copy to interact with the title, and sharing a notebook does not transfer that access to somebody who has not purchased their own copy.
3. The book can now be applied to the reader's own context. Expert Intelligence allows book content to sit alongside personal documents, photographs and other sources, which means the author's expertise can become part of a personalised AI conversation.
Three Questions & Answers
Does Google Expert Intelligence work with every ebook?
No. Google says select English-language ebooks are eligible, with more than 100,000 titles available at launch. Eligibility depends on the publisher, language and formatting, among other factors.
Can somebody access the interactive version if I share my notebook with them?
They need their own entitlement to the book. Google says collaborators who do not own the title will be prompted to purchase their own copy; otherwise the book is unavailable to them within the shared notebook.
Is this the same as an AI Book Companion™?
There is considerable overlap in the underlying reader behaviour: questioning a book, applying its ideas and grounding responses in the author's source material. AI Book Companion™ adds a more deliberately governed layer around an individual author's methodology, voice, boundaries, reader journey and intellectual property.
Sources
Google — Expert Intelligence: a new way for you to engage with trusted content
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-notebook/expert-intelligence-leading-sources/
Google Play Help — Expert Intelligence
https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/17068529?hl=en-GB
Publishers Weekly — Google Launches AI Tool to Add Interactivity to E-books
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/101136-google-launches-expert-intelligence-adding-interactivity-to-e-books.html
I use AI to help research, organise and refine my writing. The ideas, expertise and intellectual property are my own, and every article is reviewed and approved by me before publication.