Google has expanded Gemini Notebook so students in the United States and India can now add hundreds of textbooks to their notebooks at no charge, turning the study tool into a grounded research companion rather than a general chatbot. The catalog draws on OpenStax, the Open Textbook Library and S Chand Publishing, and every answer drawn from a textbook carries inline citations and direct links back to the original source. Students can also turn textbook material into tailored study guides, practice quizzes and flashcards.
What students get
To use the new catalog, a student opens a notebook, selects Add sources and then chooses Textbooks to browse what is available. Once a title is added, questions are answered from the book itself, not from the open web, and each response points back to the passage it came from.
The same material can then be reshaped into study tools. Google says students can generate tailored study guides, practice quizzes and flashcards from a textbook, turning a static chapter into something they can test themselves against. The feature sits inside last month’s Expert Intelligence effort, a cross-Google push to help people work with trusted sources through its AI products.
The launch catalog
The choice of launch publishers matters. OpenStax already gives away free, peer-reviewed textbooks in the United States, so its presence makes the catalog immediately useful for American undergraduates. S Chand, one of India’s largest education publishers, does the same for Indian students, whose course books are often expensive relative to family budgets.
The launch is deliberately narrow in geography. Only students in the United States and India can browse the new catalog for now, and Google has not said when other countries will follow. The catalog is described as hundreds of titles, not a complete library, so availability will vary by subject and course.
A wider Gemini push
The textbook catalog arrives days after Google gave Gemini the ability to create and edit files without leaving a chat, pushing the assistant further into everyday coursework. Together, the two updates point in the same direction: Gemini is becoming a place where students draft, revise and study, rather than a window they ask questions through.
Why It Matters
Grounded answers are the feature’s real test. General chatbots can summarize a topic fluently while getting a detail wrong, and a student revising for an exam has little way to catch the error. A textbook-backed answer changes that bargain, because the citation lets the student open the passage and judge it for themselves.
There is a commercial angle too. Free, trusted course material lowers the barrier for students who cannot afford every textbook, and it keeps them inside Google’s study ecosystem rather than a rival’s. Publishers gain a new distribution channel for titles that students might otherwise pirate or skip.
Rivals are moving the same way. Notebook-style tools from other labs also promise grounded answers, but few bundle a publisher catalog directly into the product. Google’s advantage is distribution: Gemini already reaches students through school accounts and phones, so a textbook shelf inside the notebook needs no new habit to form.
Students should still treat generated study aids as a starting point, not a verdict. A quiz or flashcard set built from a textbook can still misstate a definition or drop a condition, and the safeguard is the citation itself: check the passage before trusting the summary. Used that way, the tool rewards revision rather than replacing it.
Background
Gemini Notebook began life as NotebookLM, a research assistant that answers only from sources its user supplies, and Google renamed it in July 2026 as it folded the tool deeper into the Gemini app. The textbook catalog extends the same idea from a student’s own files to published course material.
An October update connected notebooks to other Google services, letting them pull in outside material alongside uploaded files. The textbook catalog follows that pattern, adding published course books as a first-class source rather than another file the student must find and upload.
Source: Google’s textbook announcement and NDTV’s coverage
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