- The Daily Grind: Tech's Morning Newsletter
- Posts
- Daily Grind July 25, 2025: NotebookLM Featured Notesbooks and the Future of Knowledge
Daily Grind July 25, 2025: NotebookLM Featured Notesbooks and the Future of Knowledge
Welcome to Tech's morning newsletter, where you get one headline, one page of a great book, and one question to start your day.
Ben Putano
July 25, 2025
Good morning!
Welcome to The Daily Grind for Friday, July 25, 2025.
Today we are continuing with our theme of the future of knowledge in the age of AI. Our featured article highlights a cool new tool that gives us a glimpse of one potential future.
Plus, I share a page from one of the most emotionally-moving books I’ve ever read, just to highlight that not all work can be summarized.
Finally, let’s recap the week by focusing on some wins.
Let’s get into it!
📰 One Headline: NotebookLM Featured Notebooks—The Future of Expert Knowledge?
Last week I talked about AI and the future of reading, and discussed the idea of written texts becoming fungible and remixable, similar to how music is sampled and photographs are memeified today.
In other words, written work could be adapted and personalized based on our tastes. Whether this sounds like a great idea or terrible one depends on your literary values.
Regardless, the future of reading will be different than it has been in the past. One exciting possibility is to make books—and all long-form writing, as well as video and audio content—interactive.
Last week, Google Labs announced Featured Notebooks as part of their AI research tool, NotebookLM. This new project represents one possible future for books and expert knowledge.
, the Editorial Director for Google Labs and NotebookLM, wrote an article yesterday about the inspiration behind Featured Notebooks and his vision for the future of knowledge. (Shout out to my friend, , for sharing with me!)
Johnson’s post is well-worth a read, but here are my big takeaways:
Featured Notebooks as “Knowledge on Tap”
Johnson’s metaphor for the Featured Notebooks is a "knowledge bottle,” something you can pop open and get deep expertise whenever you need it. These Notebooks include dozens of sources from top experts in a field. You can ask the Notebook questions, create a study guide, visualize the information with a mind map, or create an two-person audio conversation on the topic.
NotebookLM is great at expanding and “remixing” knowledge for the reader, letting them explore it in different ways.
There is also a Featured Notebook on the entire works of Shakespeare. Johnson shared this very cool Mindmap of Shakespeare’s entire works, organized by theme:
NotebookLM creates a 3D Reading Experience
Last month, NotebookLM announced public Notebooks that could be created and shared with the world. According to Johnson, 140,000 public Notebooks have been created already.
As a publisher, one very cool possibility with public Notebooks is to give our most avid readers a deep well of research—well beyond what made it into the final manuscript—to explore and enhance their experience.
For example, The Experimentation Machine by Jeffrey Bussgang is based on dozens of Jeff’s HBS case studies, interviews with founders, personal blogs, and more. With NotebookLM, we can upload the book AND all the research material to give readers a choose-your-own-adventure-type reading experience.
(In a way Jeff has already done this by creating a Chat Clone of himself on Delphi. Ask it anything you want!)
NotebookLM lets you explore rabbit holes and apply books directly to your own life.
NotebookLM is the best tool when accuracy is paramount
Why use NotebookLM instead of tools like Claude or ChatGPT?
NotebookLM is designed for useful and accurate research synthesis. It’s built on Gemini 2.5-Flash, one of the best models when it comes to minimizing hallucinations.
By comparison, 2.5-Flash is 13.33% more accurate that GPT-4o (the current default model in ChatGPT) and 346% more accurate that Claude-4 Sonnet.
Note: The Claude models are so bad with hallucinations that they didn’t make the chart below. Claude-4 Sonnet has a hallucination rate of 4.5%.
Featured Notebooks are a good step, but not the future of books
Despite all its cool features, I’m not convinced NotebookLM and its featured Notebooks are the future of books. There are two big issues:
Limited scope: NotebookLM is a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, meaning it only pulls knowledge from the sources you upload. This makes it highly accurate when pulling information from those sources, but it has limited knowledge about the outside world.
You can’t cross-reference other books. Book publishers are notoriously protective of their IP, which means you can’t just upload a bunch of manuscripts to NotebookLM to cross-reference.
The ideal system for future books would prioritize the source material, but could also access the rest of the world’s knowledge. It would also include all relevant books for you to dive in and out of, creating a full map of the knowledge space. For this to happen, unfortunately, we would need a complete restructuring of the publishing business model.
For now, try out NotebookLM as your personal tutor and “digital library.” If you’re a student or knowledge worker, upload all your available source materials, plus your own works into a Notebook. You can do this based on theme (for example, Ultimate Frisbee) or create a general Notebook about your life and work.
Then start a conversation with the Notebook—ask it something like, “What are a few themes of this work that I might have overlooked?”
Finally, share your notebook with a friend or colleague so they can play around.
While the future of books—in their current form—is uncertain, I am confident that the need and desire for expert knowledge is as strong as ever.
Maybe interactive workspaces like NotebookLM are the future, or maybe they are just the beginning.
🔗 A Few Good Links
📚 One Page: A Choice of Weapons by Gordon Parks
In the section above, I mentioned “literary values.” I am no pearl-clutching traditionalist, but I do fear that by remixing writing to suit our own interests, we will lose connection with the writer. One beautiful thing about writing is that we can experience another person’s life through their eyes. I see the value of remixed and fungible writing, but it would be a tragedy to lose touch with the original work.
Today I want to share a page—the first page—from one of my favorite books: A Choice of Weapons by Gordon Parks.
I’m sharing because no remixed version of this book could capture the emotion of Parks’ writing. This is a book that must be read in its original form.
WE ARE STANDING SILENT in the safe quarter of this pale green gas chamber. There are twelve of us and a cocky young guard; his orders splinter my thoughts: “Don’t move around—don’t gesture—don’t talk aloud—obey commands promptly.” Now, for some unaccountable reason, the guard is motioning me down front—to within three feet of the waiting chair. From here, only a thick glass will separate me from the death we have agreed to witness. Close behind us a minister leafs his Bible for words to say at the appropriate time.
The color of the walls seems so incompatible with the occasion. Why not a somber gray or, better still, black?
The door to the death cubicle is opening. The quiet is heavy, and I damn myself for accepting the warden’s invitation. But it’s too late for that now; the doomed man is already coming, ashen and shaking, flanked by three beefy guards. He is dressed in blue prison denim, wears gray flannel bedroom slippers and moves with a hesitant shuffle as they guide him through the door. Only the compassionate whispers of the minister stir the silence—that the saying of Jesus might be fulfilled, which he spake, signifying what death he should die.
The prisoner observes us through tears; and, for a curious moment, his eyes seem to question our presence.
❓ One Question: What are you proud of accomplishing this week?
It’s Friday, so let’s do some positive reflection on the week:
What are you proud of accomplishing this week?
Share in a comment if you’re so willing! No win is too big or small
🗳️ Wrap Up and Feedback:
That’s it for the 3rd full week of The Daily Grind.
I had some trouble getting the newsletter out on time this week, but this is all part of the learning curve! The feedback has been very positive so far and I thank you all for reading.
See y’all next week!
Cheers,
Ben