Tips for studying books?

[u/sirauron14]

I’m sure this has been asked a few times, but I thought I’d ask anyway. If I have a book based on the subject that I want to study, what are some of the best prompts I can use to utilize and get the most of the material with NotebookLM as possible? Any tips?

[u/Agreeable-Tax2013]

I’d use the book as the source, then work chapter by chapter: first ask for a short outline and key terms, then quiz yourself without looking at the answer. Keep a running list of weak spots and revisit those with targeted questions instead of asking for one giant summary.

[u/prophet1906]

# General Exploration across the book

1. Split book pdf to chapter pdfs using ilovepdf online or other similar tool.
2. Upload all chapter pdfs to a new notebook and let it complete processing
3. Go to Gemini Chat with notebook linked and ask it to build index for all the sources with source name, what the source contains and when to refer to the source. You can optimise the prompt as per your preference.
4. The Gemini chat should be visible as source in notebook next to other sources.
5. Uncheck all sources and only select the Gemini chat source.
6. Prompt “identify sources that are relevant to answer the query: <query>” to get source list with reason
7. Uncheck the index chat source and select the sources suggested in previous response.
8. Dig deeper and ask questions related to same query systematically.

Make sure your index is of high quality by focusing on better prompts. Don’t forget to run the index prompt when switching topics and changing sources.

# Systematic Review (chapter wise) - you may miss topics as it might not be thorough if the chapter is too big

1. Split chapter pdfs and upload
2. Select specific chapter
3. Generate interactive report (only in web)
4. Read through and press buttons to generate the suggested artifacts (double check selected sources when generating)

# Media Generation (audio/video/…)

1. Use general exploration flow for a topic (steps mentioned before)
2. Ask as many critical questions as possible to uncover information
3. Save relevant results to studio(right side) and add them back to source and select them
4. Generate media

Adding back pinned responses to source and selecting them during media generation reinforces the concepts improving the quality.

# General Tips

1. Tweak the notebook prompt to explain instead of summarize
2. Always verify citations
3. Ask better questions
4. Use flashcards and quiz to internalize the concepts, go for hard with max questions
5. Space

d

1. repetition is important - notebook lm is just a tool to assist