GitHub - divyenduz/notebooklm-calibre-plugin: Send Calibre books / magazines to NotebookLM to be turned into a podcast

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3 min read Original article ↗

A Calibre GUI plugin that seamlessly integrates with Google's NotebookLM to generate podcast-style "Audio Overviews" of your books directly from your Calibre library.

Plugin Demo

By clicking a single button in Calibre, this plugin will:

  1. Extract the best available format of your selected book (prefers PDF or TXT, falls back to EPUB/MOBI/AZW3).
  2. Automatically create a new notebook in your Google NotebookLM account.
  3. Upload your book as a source document.
  4. Trigger the generation of an Audio Overview on Google's servers in the background.

Prerequisites

Because Google does not provide an official public API for NotebookLM, this plugin relies on the open-source community CLI tool gemini-notebook-mcp-cli to communicate with the service.

  1. Install the CLI tool by following the installation instructions in their documentation. Ensure the nlm command is available in your system's PATH.

  2. Authenticate the CLI with your NotebookLM account:

    Follow the prompts to log in via your browser.

Installation

You can install this plugin directly into Calibre using the calibre-customize command-line tool.

  1. Clone or download this repository.
  2. Open your terminal and navigate to the plugin folder:
  3. Build and install the plugin into Calibre:
  4. Restart Calibre.

Adding to Toolbar

Once installed, you need to add the plugin button to your Calibre UI:

  1. Open Calibre.
  2. Go to Preferences -> Toolbars & menus.
  3. Select The main toolbar (or whichever toolbar you prefer) from the top dropdown.
  4. On the left side under "Available actions", scroll down to find NotebookLM Audio.
  5. Select it and click the Right Arrow button to move it to the right side ("Current actions").
  6. Click Apply (or OK) at the top left.

Usage

  1. Select a book in your Calibre library.
  2. Click the new NotebookLM Audio (sparkles) icon in your toolbar.
  3. A progress dialog will appear showing you the upload status.
  4. Once it successfully triggers the generation, the dialog will notify you and close.
  5. You can now head over to NotebookLM in your browser—your new notebook will be there, and the Audio Overview will finish generating shortly!

Disclaimer & Limitations

  • Unofficial API: This plugin relies on undocumented Google NotebookLM web endpoints via the nlm CLI. If Google changes their web interface, this tool may temporarily break until the upstream CLI is updated.
  • Background Generation: Because Audio Overviews can take anywhere from 3 to 15 minutes to generate, this plugin intentionally does not wait for the generation to finish, nor does it automatically download the final .wav / .mp3 file back into Calibre. You will need to listen to or download the audio directly from the NotebookLM website once it is ready.