Google rolled out featured notebooks in NotebookLM yesterday. These curated collections let you tap into expert knowledge right away.
Key Points
- Eight initial notebooks cover longevity, parenting, 2025 trends, Shakespeare, and more.
- Interact via AI Q&A, audio overviews, and mind maps grounded in sources.
- Partnerships include The Atlantic, The Economist, Eric Topol, and Jacqueline Nesi.
NotebookLM is Google's popular AI research assistant. It grounds answers in your uploaded sources to avoid made-up info. Launched in 2023, it helps with note-taking, summaries, and deep dives.
Now, featured notebooks will make starting easier. No need to hunt for sources yourself. For example, Eric Topol's longevity notebook draws from his book "Super Agers." It gives science-based tips on healthy aging. You can ask questions like "What's the role of exercise in longevity?" and get cited answers.
Jacqueline Nesi's parenting one pulls from her Techno Sapiens newsletter. It offers psychology-backed advice for raising kids in a digital world. The Economist's covers 2025 predictions from their World Ahead report. The Atlantic's features Arthur C. Brooks on building a better life. Others include a Yellowstone science guide, human wellbeing trends from Our World in Data, Shakespeare's full works, and Q1 2025 earnings for top companies.
What makes these different is how they work inside NotebookLM: you don’t just read the content—you interact with it. You can ask follow-up questions, generate mind maps, or even listen to an audio summary. The answers are AI-generated but always cite back to the original source.
NotebookLM has also quietly rolled out public notebook sharing. In the last month alone, users created over 140,000 public notebooks. This new batch of featured collections builds on that momentum, making high-quality, vetted knowledge instantly usable.
As The Atlantic’s CEO Nicholas Thompson put it, “The books of the future won’t just be static: some will talk to you, some will evolve with you, and some will exist in forms we can’t imagine now.”