Google launches “Expert Intelligence”, an initiative to bring trusted sources into Gemini. First: Play Books in Gemini Notebook, with 100,000+ titles from Penguin Random House, Macmillan, O’Reilly and others. Coming soon: “Third-party subscriptions, textbooks, and broader surface availability like AI Mode in Search and the Gemini App.”
- Authors collaborated directly on "Featured Notebooks" that supplement their books with extra sources, and publishers negotiated controls requiring users to own a book through Google Play before interacting with it in a notebook.
- If a shared notebook includes a book someone hasn't purchased, the content becomes unavailable to them, which is a meaningful DRM mechanic dressed up as a feature.
- The roadmap toward AI Mode in Search is the part worth watching: grounding search answers in licensed, author-approved content is a very different business model than scraping the open web.
