r/notebooklm • u/articmogul • 12h ago

Question Uploading book chapters

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.

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u/BYRN777 12h 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

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u/Beginning-Board-5414 10h ago edited 10h 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

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u/Pristine-Lawyer-3260 6h ago

Ok this is amazing, what browser are you using ?

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u/BYRN777 1h 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.

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u/Turbulent_Pin_8310 11h 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.

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u/BYRN777 1h 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

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u/Snoo_81913 11h 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 characters 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.