GPT Summarizer Book Prompts
Turbocharge Your Research
These are my latest prompts for summarizing PDF books using the Summarizer GPT (4o). I use the paid version of Chat-GPT, so I’m not sure what the results will be on the free versions or other Large Language Models. As I have explained in earlier posts, upload a PDF version of a book (many are available here) and then start using the prompts. Since GPT “learns” as you submit queries, I suggest running the “Expanded Summary” last. If you want to test my thesis, run Expanded Summary first, then run all the other prompts, then rerun it and compare it to what it did the first time.
I will make the usual disclaimer that GPT Summarizer IS NO SUBSTITUTE for reading the book. It is invaluable, however, if you have read the book and want a terrific set of notes (or want to ask the book questions). It’s also very good at simplifying complicated ideas, but you must review the responses to ensure it does not leave anything out.
Things to look out for:
Example: For my Stephen Coughlin Series, GPT Summarizer was reading a YouTube transcript and having a hard time determining whether Coughlin said something or Bertrand Russell; on reviewing the answer, I needed to explain to the GPT Summarizer its error, and then it fixed the problem. I might have missed it if I had not already watched all four Coughlin videos.
Example: In my Daniel Ganser NATO Summary (which I will publish shortly), the GPT Summarizer omitted Henry Kissinger from the list of notable people in the book. I had to tell it to add him to the list. I also asked if Steve Pieczenik was in the book, and IT SAID YES and added him to the list of people. Steve Pieczenik is mentioned in Operation Gladio, another book about the same subject, but he’s not in Ganser’s book, so I caught it.
Additionally, GPT is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. It will occasionally miss things and hallucinate answers, so you must constantly review the responses. Always double-check quotes and citations, as they are OFTEN less-than-exact. Sometimes, a quote winds up being a grammar-corrected version of the original. Sometimes, a citation is off by a page. In short, if you're using GPT Summarizer to do your homework, you may get an F if you don’t check the outputs.
That said, it’s an amazing tool. I hope you have fun with the prompts, which include an Expanded Summary, FAQs, Quotes (not perfect, but sometimes worth doing), People, Organizations, Locations, Timeline, and Bibliography. The prompts are in the native language of Large Language Models “Markdown.” Markdown is one of the oldest ways that you can tell a computer how to “Mark up” plain test with things we take for granted today like bold, italics, lists, and tables.
Other tools that are very helpful in managing your research are:
Obsidian, a free “Markdown” editing super-tool (GPT outputs Markdown). You can learn to use Obsidian here.
Dillinger.io is a Markdown converter
Anna’s Archive is a great resource for hard-to-find books.
Have fun with this, and I would love to hear your questions or comments.