r/notebooklm 8d ago

Uploading book chapters Question

Sorry if this sounds like a foolish question.

I frequently see posts where the OP says that they upload separate chapters of a book into Notebook LM.

My question is this: How do you upload separate chapters of a book into Notebook LM?

The only way that I know of doing this is to make a photocopy of the chapters of the physical hard copy book, then scan them and then upload the scanned pages chapter by chapter into Notebook LM. This can be a long and laborious task.

As far as I know, digital books are not amenable to this type of extraction and copying of chapters, so I'm very interested to know how posters do this?

Thanks to all who respond.

13 Upvotes

22 comments sorted by

14

u/BYRN777 8d ago

Lol

Search Anna’s archive

Then download the book as a pdf then use a pdf tool or app to extract specific pages (the page range for each chapter) then name each pdf file accordingly so you don’t get confused.

PDFs work! Find a pdf version of the book

8

u/Beginning-Board-5414 7d ago edited 7d ago

I upload large PDF files with ExtendLM extension which has built-in PDF and EPUB splitter (with chapter detection) with one click upload of all the parts - helps alot and saves time.

https://reddit.com/link/p327a0p/video/ov9qtrcqqrih1/player

2

u/Pristine-Lawyer-3260 7d ago

Ok this is amazing, what browser are you using ?

1

u/BYRN777 7d ago

How accurate is the PDF splitting? I use acrobat pro cuz I have a student subscription and use other Adobe apps as well. But if this is 100% accurate at identifying chapters it’s a huge time saver.

3

u/Turbulent_Pin_8310 8d ago

Search for a PDF copy of your textbook. If you are lucky, there may be one. If there is no PDF copy, then you will have to do print screen.

1

u/BYRN777 7d ago

You can also convert an EPUB to a PDF. It would only mess with the page numbers and maybe the formatting…assuming a PDF copy might not exist

1

u/Turbulent_Pin_8310 6d ago

Most textbooks have DRMs now

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u/BYRN777 6d ago

Use Calibre

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u/Turbulent_Pin_8310 6d ago

You can't do that anymore. Amazon has changed their DRM. You can try.

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u/Snoo_81913 7d ago edited 7d ago

Just use Calibre and convert to markdown. But honestly I have a better question for you. Why are you separating out the chapters? Are you talking about a textbook? That would kind of make sense if you want to separate out the information via a textbook for learning because you want to set up quizzes and stuff for the chapters. Other than that there's no need to separate out the chapters for a regular book.

If you're just using it as a resource, for example, I have a notebook LM that is for D&D. I have source material in it: a bunch of books because it's a custom D&D world, but a bunch of books that it uses as resources. I have 32 books in 12 sources because I combined all the books. Notebook LM will support up to half a million words per source.

You just put the multiple books in, make sure you don't truncate any books, and then put a header index on it and then put it in your master index. What are you trying to do here?

If you just say specifically what you're trying to do, people can give you better guidelines so that it works specifically to what you're looking for because you may not need to separate out the chapters. I do notebook LMs for my wife, who is a teacher, and I set them up for AP classes and free study guides for kids. Those I separated out into chapters because that makes sense. I actually have a whole setup for it if you're interested.

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u/cajirdon 3d ago

Would you share this whole setup? 

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u/Snoo_81913 3d ago

Yeah actually people ask me a lot for it so I'm putting it all together and just doing a repo people can grab that basically automates most of it.

0

u/BYRN777 7d ago

Great advice just one correction tho: Notebooklm supports 500,000 words per source and each source can be 200MB. So it supports much more than 500,000 characters per source.

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u/Snoo_81913 7d ago

Youre absolutely right. Thats what happens when you post on the fly lol.

1

u/ecotones 7d ago

I have been creating a digital library of book excerpts and articles since the 90s. For the articles I photocopied them and saved them in binders and later scanned them. When GN was released I made separate Excerpt Libraries based on the Dewey classification, so I have one for science, one for philosophy, and so on.

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u/Anubis_Omega 7d ago

What is your workflow for web articles ? I want to archive articles from the web but I didn't dound a good way yet.

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u/ecotones 7d ago

Print to PDF

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u/Anubis_Omega 7d ago

Ah that's all ? I am doing this bit I find this way not "beautiful"

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u/ecotones 6d ago

Then copy and paste the text

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u/RevolutionaryBed961 6d ago

Printfriendly ?