Sharing Notebooks and Using the Mobile App
NotebookLM is not only a solo tool. You can share a notebook with classmates, teammates, or clients so they can explore the same grounded material, and you can carry your notebooks in your pocket with the mobile app. This lesson covers both collaboration and mobile, so your notebooks travel with you and with the people you work with.
What You'll Learn
- How to share a notebook and what viewers can do
- When to share versus keep a notebook private
- What the mobile app is good at
- How mobile and desktop fit into one workflow
Sharing a notebook
Any notebook you own can be shared. Open the notebook and use the Share option to invite others. When you share, you choose what access people get:
- Viewer access lets people read the sources, ask their own questions in chat, and use the outputs you created, without changing the notebook's sources.
- Editor access lets collaborators add and remove sources and generate new outputs, so the notebook becomes a shared workspace.
This is genuinely useful. A teacher can share a notebook of course readings so students can ask their own questions and generate their own study guides from it. A team lead can share a project notebook so everyone briefs themselves from the same grounded source of truth instead of forwarding documents around.
Give viewer access to share knowledge, editor access to build together.
| Criteria | Viewer | Editor |
|---|---|---|
| Read sources | Yes | Yes |
| Ask questions in chat | Yes | Yes |
| Add or remove sources | No | Yes |
| Best for | Students, clients, readers | Co-authors, project teams |
Viewer
- Read sources
- Yes
- Ask questions in chat
- Yes
- Add or remove sources
- No
- Best for
- Students, clients, readers
Editor
- Read sources
- Yes
- Ask questions in chat
- Yes
- Add or remove sources
- Yes
- Best for
- Co-authors, project teams
Sharing works through Google accounts, the same way you share a Google Doc, so people you invite sign in with their own Google login. Because a shared notebook exposes your uploaded sources, only share notebooks whose contents you are comfortable others seeing, a point the next lesson expands on.
Featured notebooks
Alongside private and shared notebooks, NotebookLM has surfaced featured notebooks: public, curated notebooks built around notable sources, so you can explore a topic someone else has already assembled. They are a nice way to see what a well-built notebook looks like and to learn a subject without gathering sources yourself. Availability and the exact selection change over time.
The mobile app
NotebookLM has an app for iPhone, iPad, and Android. It brings your notebooks to your phone and is built around the things you actually want on the go:
- Listen to Audio Overviews anywhere, including in the background while you do other things, which turns your notebooks into a personal podcast feed.
- Ask questions of your sources on the move, with the same grounded, cited answers as on desktop.
- Add sources quickly. The app makes it easy to share content straight into a notebook from other apps, for example sending a web page or PDF to NotebookLM from your browser or files.
- Browse and generate outputs from notebooks you already built on desktop.
The mobile share feature is quietly powerful: when you are reading something on your phone that you want to remember, you can send it into a notebook in a couple of taps, so your knowledge base grows as you go about your day.
A combined mobile and desktop workflow
The two work best together:
- Capture on mobileShare pages and PDFs in
- Build on desktopOrganize, generate reports
- Consume on mobileListen and ask on the go
- Capture on mobile throughout the day: send interesting articles and documents into the right notebook.
- Build on desktop when you have focus: organize sources, generate study guides and briefings, and clean things up on the larger screen.
- Consume on mobile again: listen to Audio Overviews on your commute and ask quick questions when they come up.
This loop means your notebooks are always growing and always with you, without you ever sitting down to do dedicated "NotebookLM admin."
Key Takeaways
- You can share any notebook you own, granting viewer access (read and ask) or editor access (also add and remove sources).
- Sharing works through Google accounts like a Google Doc, and it exposes your sources, so only share notebooks you are comfortable others seeing.
- Featured notebooks are public, curated notebooks you can explore to learn a topic or see how a good notebook is built.
- The mobile app (iPhone, iPad, Android) lets you listen to Audio Overviews, ask questions, and quickly share new sources into notebooks.
- The strongest workflow captures sources on mobile, builds and organizes on desktop, and consumes Audio Overviews and quick answers back on mobile.