Notebooks: study fifty sources at once, with answers that show their source

An AI chat is a poor study partner when you cannot tell where its answer came from. It may mix your textbook with something it read elsewhere, and you only find out in the exam. Notebooks in Lumen Reader are built the other way round: the sources come first, and the AI may only use them.

How a notebook works

You create a notebook and add sources from your library: up to 50 books, chapters, PDFs, Word documents or web pages you captured. Each source can be ticked on or off, so you can ask the same question of one book, or of all of them.

Ask a question and the answer is written only from the ticked sources. Each claim carries a citation, and clicking it opens that source at the place the claim came from. Today a citation points to the section or page; pointing to the exact sentence is the next step we are working on.

From answers to study material

Next to the chat is a studio that turns the same sources into something you can revise from:

• an audio overview in one of four styles (deep dive, brief, critique or debate) and three lengths, read in voices on your PC or through Gemini;
• a mind map, a briefing, a study guide, an FAQ and a timeline;
• a comparison table, flashcards and a quiz.

Everything you generate is saved in the notebook and can be sent to My notes, or exported to Markdown or Word.

Which AI does the work

You choose. Link a key you already have for Claude, OpenAI, Gemini or another provider, or install a free local model with Ollama or LM Studio and run notebooks with no internet connection at all. Lumen does not resell AI, so there is no hidden per-question charge from us.

What notebooks cannot do yet

They do not take YouTube videos or audio files as sources, they do not search the web for new sources, and you cannot interrupt an audio overview to ask a question. Those are on the list. What is there today is the part that matters most for study: answers you can check.