On August 27, Google launched Expert Intelligence, which the company describes as “a new way for you to engage with trusted content.”

The new tool lets readers add eligible books they bought through Google Play Books to Gemini Notebook, where they can use them as sources along with other material they’ve already added to the notebook.

However, you can’t just upload any old ebook you have lying around to your Gemini Notebook. If you purchased an eligible title from another platform, you won’t be able to use it with Google’s Expert Intelligence tools.

And that’s the point. Google is tying access to Expert Intelligence to where you bought your ebook — specifically, to its marketplace, Google Play Books. That move is a step beyond even the usual platform “lock-in” that readers already face with most ebook purchases.

As AI becomes more closely linked to the content we buy, those of us who buy ebooks will be faced with a new dilemma.

Google’s decision shows that, in addition to determining where we can read our ebook purchases, choosing an ebook store may increasingly determine which AI tools we can use with them afterward.

Expert Intelligence Makes Ebooks More Than Something You Read

If you don’t mind purchasing your books through Google Play, Expert Intelligence has some compelling tools that might convince you to start buying them there.

Once you’ve added an eligible book to Gemini Notebook, you can ask questions based on the text. You can also create Audio Overviews, quizzes, and infographics from the book or combine it with other sources in the same notebook. Google says more than 100,000 books are supported at launch.

Google has come up with several ways users can get the most out of the books they use with Expert Intelligence. One example is to take your own journal entries and combine them with a book you’re reading to find passages relevant to your experience. Of course, that would mean trusting Google’s AI notebook with your innermost thoughts.

If you’re not comfortable with sharing your personal thoughts with Google, you can use Expert Intelligence for something less private, like pictures of food in your refrigerator, and then pair that with a book like Michael Pollan’s “Food Rules” to help you create a meal plan.

Google Play Books already uses Book insights, which can answer questions about characters, themes, and passages while you read and provide a recap of what you’ve read so far. With Expert Intelligence, you can bring a book into Gemini Notebook with your own documents and other sources, then ask questions based on everything in the notebook.

That means if you buy a cookbook, management guide, or textbook, you won’t have to waste time flipping back through pages trying to remember where the author addressed your problem. You can just add the book to a notebook that already has your own material and ask Gemini to use both when answering questions.

But as we mentioned earlier, all this convenience comes with a catch: Your book has to come from the right store.

AI Adds Another Layer to Ebook Platform Lock-In

The biggest limitation of this new tool is that you must have purchased or rented an eligible ebook from Google Play Books to use Expert Intelligence with it. Even if you upload an ebook yourself to your Play Books library, it won’t count.

If you share a notebook with someone, the restriction applies there, too. That means if someone you’re working with already owns the book but bought it elsewhere, they’ll have to buy another copy through Google Play before they can interact with it using Expert Intelligence.

In other words, owning the same title isn’t enough. Where you bought it now affects the AI features you can use with it.

Amazon has a similar, but more limited, tool with its ‘Ask this Book’ feature. The tool lets readers in the United States ask questions about thousands of eligible English-language Kindle books that they’ve borrowed or purchased.

Ask this Book can answer questions about plot details, character relationships, and themes, all without spoiling parts of the book you haven’t read yet.

Google’s Expert Intelligence and Amazon’s Ask this Book aren’t the same. Ask this Book currently works in the Kindle iOS app, while Expert Intelligence can use eligible Google Play books with other sources in Gemini Notebook.

Even with those differences, they point in the same direction: ebook stores can now compete on what their software lets you do with a book after you buy it.

If you’ve ever used an ebook, you know that this type of lock-in isn’t exactly new. DRM and proprietary ecosystems have spent years making it hard to move purchases freely between competing platforms.

A book doesn’t have to become unreadable on another platform to make moving between them feel like more work than it’s worth. All it takes is losing a few useful features.

If you spend a lot of time using Gemini for work or school, a Google Play edition that works inside your notebooks may become more useful than the same ebook elsewhere. A dedicated Kindle reader may prefer Amazon’s tools instead.

And that’s how they get us to stay in their ecosystem. The book we’re reading hasn’t changed; it’s the services wrapped around it that have.

Google Wants Expert Intelligence to Go Beyond Books

Books in Gemini Notebook are just the first step in Google’s vision for Expert Intelligence. Google plans to bring Expert Intelligence-enabled content into the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search. Eventually, the company will add sources such as third-party subscriptions, business research reports, and textbooks.

A subscription has traditionally bought us access to content, while buying a textbook has given us access to the book itself. If companies start attaching AI capabilities to those purchases, as consumers, we may also have to consider which service we want to use with that paid content.

Google’s approach isn’t without benefits. Asking questions about the content you’ve paid for can be much more helpful than asking a general chatbot to reconstruct a book from whatever information it can find.

Publishers also get to control whether a book is included, and Google requires each person interacting with a book to have purchased their own eligible copy.

However, that convenience can be pretty sticky. The more useful your library becomes when paired with one company’s tools, the harder it becomes to view another storefront as an interchangeable place to buy the same title.

Google says Expert Intelligence is designed to help readers get more out of the books they’ve bought. And it may actually accomplish that with its latest AI tool.

It also means the next time you buy an ebook, the bookstore you choose could determine a lot more than where you turn the pages. Google knows that, and it’s hoping that will keep you in its ecosystem.

Originally published by Techopedia on August 31, 2026.