BookClubLM is a project to create engaging book club style discussions for interesting books, using AI.
TLDR: I used Google’s NotebookLM to create chapter-wise discussions of The Minimalist Entrepreneur by Sahil Lavingia. Get the entire thing here.
Here’s how it happened, entirely:
Last week, I started playing with Google’s new AI tool NotebookLM.
The first thing I tried was to upload Chapter 1 of a book I’m currently reading: The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky. I spent some time using NotebookLM’s chat feature to understand key concepts. But that’s when I also tried the Audio Overview feature.
And it blew my mind.
Here’s a snippet of the audio I got:
The conversation sounds pretty real, and the AI “hosts” add their own examples, often beyond what’s in the text, to explain fundamental concepts.
I generated more audio overviews and soon discovered some problems too.
Like other generative AI tools, NotebookLM’s Audio Overview can hallucinate. The hosts go on an off-topic digression that might not align with the original text.
Frequently, there are audio artifacts, random sounds that pop up in the audio.
But I figured, those can be worked with.
The outputs are way better than any other AI generated human-like audio thing I’d tried (and I’ve tried a lot of them).
I decided to use NotebookLM to make chapter-wise audio discussions for The Minimalist Entrepreneur by Sahil Lavingia
The goal was to simulate authentic discussions that typically occur in a real book club setting, something that helps people retain key ideas in a book much better.
Listening to a discussion about the key takeaways from a book in simple language is very helpful for me. And for each chapter, the discussion length should be less than 15 minutes.
Here’s how it turned out:
This is the entire simulated audio discussion for Chapter 0 - Introduction, from the book.
Here are some key steps to do this:
- Feeding the text of a chapter. This is important but not enough. NotebookLM’s Audio Overview isn’t good at structuring the discussion in a way that covers the entire chapter, along with the key ideas.
- Giving Episode Notes to NotebookLM really helps. I used ChatGPT to generate Episode Notes for each chapter, and would crosscheck them with the actual book in my hand. I ensured that the outline includes the important ideas, and removed the unnecessary ones for brevity. This significantly improved the quality of the output.
- I generated 3-4 audio files from the tool, for each chapter. These would range from 7 to 14 minutes. The tool currently has no features to control the output length.
- And then, it’s pretty much down to editing. I use Adobe Premiere Pro to edit the episodes. Here’s what my average timeline looks like:
- I edited out hallucinations and artifacts. Adobe Podcast AI’s Enhance Audio is helpful for cleaning up audio artifacts that overlap with useful content. And sometimes, basic editing is enough.
And that’s it! Do this for every chapter, and you get a complete book club style discussion.
Check out my tweet thread on this here.
Get BookClubLM audio for the first half of the book (Chapters 1-4) for just $1 here.
Feel free to hit me up for feedback, insights, and maybe suggest more books for the project.
Thanks for supporting! :)
