NotebookBloom: I could have shipped fake-looking page numbers. I didn’t.
NotebookBloom: I could have shipped fake-looking page numbers. I didn’t.
NotebookLM can jump to the passage behind a citation, but it does not reliably expose the original PDF page number.
I looked into adding page numbers to NotebookBloom anyway. The tempting approach was to extract the PDF text, fuzzy-match the quoted passage, and print the page where the closest match appeared.
It worked in clean PDFs. It also failed in exactly the documents where users would trust it most: OCR scans, two-column papers, repeated headers, and passages NotebookLM had normalized.
So I left the feature out. NotebookBloom keeps the source title and quoted passage, but asks the user to verify the page in the original PDF.
This was a useful solo-founder reminder: a feature can make the product look smarter while making the result less trustworthy.
Would you rather have a best-effort page number marked “unverified,” or no page number at all?
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