Listening to any spoken format, whether it's podcasts or audiobooks, is bound to come with some pauses. If you're bothered by that sort of thing and want to keep things running as smoothly as possible, the latest Play Books update will help you with that. There's a new option that will do some basic audio magic to detect longer moments of silence and cut them down so you won't have to sit through any long gaps in sound.

The new Trim Silences option can be found in the playback settings menu. You can open this menu by tapping the playback speed button in the audiobook player. By default, the option is disabled.

By all appearances, this seems to be identical to the Trim Silence feature added to the Google Podcast player just last month. However, since most audiobooks are professionally edited to remove most long pauses, this feature probably won't be quite as useful in Play Books. At least in my brief attempt to find samples, I didn't notice much difference. Nevertheless, it's good to see silence trimming added here for the occasional audiobook that could benefit from it.

Download

The APK is signed by Google and upgrades your existing app. The cryptographic signature guarantees that the file is safe to install and was not tampered with in any way. Rather than wait for Google to push this download to your devices, which can take days, download and install it just like any other APK.