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Google Play Books is bringing an iOS-only feature to Android
Organizing your library just got easier
Google Play Books has been my eBook reader of choice for years now, but there's one part of the experience that's always grated on me — organizing my library. But that's changing, as a feature from the iOS version of the app finally makes its way to Android.
Google is going to replace Google Discover on tablets with a new interface
A central space for movies, games, and books
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We all know that Android tablets aren't exactly the industry benchmark, and Google has mostly stopped creating first-party products for this market. But the company still hasn't given up on tablets. It has just announced an "Entertainment Space" that should make Android tablets vastly better at giving you access to your streaming services, ebooks, and games — right on the leftmost panel of your homescreen.
Google Play Books doesn't come up much in the news these days, but the service is still kicking, even offering the occasional hot deal every now and then. As of today, Play Books is 10 years old, marking a decade of bringing reading (and listening) pleasure to millions.
Android gets thousands of new emoji combinations, AI-generated audiobooks, and more
Emoji Kitchen, Play Books, and Voice Access get new features this holiday season
Christmas is right around the corner, and Google wanted to spoil us with a bunch of new features this holiday season. From expanding its emoji kitchen, to offering AI-generated audiobooks, and easier hands-free access for people with disabilities, there's a lot to pick from. In addition to these features, Google also expanded Android Auto to 36 more countries, rolled out a new Go tab in Maps to make it easier to navigate to frequently visited places, and updated Nearby Share to send apps.
The Play Store is offering nearly 30 kids' books for free
There's something for every age range, though the deals are only valid in the US and Canada
I'm not a parent, but I can imagine that many are getting driven insane by their kids now that everyone's stuck at home. If you're looking for a cost-effective way to potentially calm them down, the Google Play Store is currently offering almost 30 books, with some reading for a variety of age groups.
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In a time when our media consumption — from video to music to books and more — is stratified across myriad platforms and when we just can't be bothered to download another application that'll end up taking precious space on our phones, Google faces the challenge of consumer malaise as it battles for its piece of those markets. One way it has tried to get people excited for apps again is with its all-you-can-eat Play Pass scheme. Another tool that the company has deployed in other countries and is launching in the United States from today is a loyalty program covering everything under the Play Store tent called Play Points.
Slowly but surely, Google's different apps are getting a dark mode to go with Android 10's system-wide setting. The latest app to receive this treatment is Google Play Books, which just got updated to v5.4.
Google has always been a fast-iterating company that welcomes feedback from customers on new features. It routinely launches betas and gives interested parties the chance to take a look at unfinished products. Just as it used to have an extensive collection of individual lab features in Gmail (called "advanced" today), the company is now giving Google Play Books users access to library features they can cherry-pick from.
Google Play Books adopted the latest iteration of the Google Material theme back in January, doing away with the colorful version that exemplified the original Material Design. This update doesn't have quite as many striking changes, but it does bring functional improvements and a little more customizability to some of the features. Most of the additions are focused on Audiobooks, but you'll also find new icons for the app shortcuts.
Google's been slowly but surely updating its apps to match its new Material Theme look (sometimes called "Material Design 2," much to Google's chagrin). In some cases we've seen substantial changes, sometimes the differences are minor. Play Books is the latest first-party app to get a new coat of paint, and in this case, the tweaks are pretty small.
Every week, I examine somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred app updates while looking for changes. The most interesting things turn into APK Teardowns or Download posts. Many of the remaining updates are unremarkable, amounting to a few bug fixes, routine updates to libraries, or even just pixel-level adjustments to layouts and images. However, there are usually a few updates that land somewhere in between. I don't want to spam readers with dozens of short posts, but I hate to ignore things that people might want to know about, so I'm going to wrap up the leftovers for a little weekend reading and call it Update Notes.
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.
If you own one of Google's Home devices, you might want to keep an eye on your email's inbox. Google is giving some people their choice of a free audiobook to celebrate the format's recent arrival on Google Play. Even better, it looks like Google is allowing the promo to be applied to pretty much any audiobook in its new library, meaning you can get an audiobook that would cost almost as much as your Home Mini did for free.
Play Books v4 prepares to launch audiobooks with support for casting and Android Auto [APK Teardown]
Play Books just hit version 4 yesterday, but on the surface it looks like very little has changed. There are a couple of relatively small tweaks here and there, but it wouldn't appear to deserve a big version jump. However, this is the version that will launch audiobook support. A teardown shows that there's a ton of new functionality hiding below the surface and it's all just waiting for Google to flip the switch.
Outside of Samsung's yearly announcement of a new Galaxy Note, it's rare to see anything interesting happening with a stylus. However, the latest update to Google Play Books comes with some new behavior that makes a stylus much more useful with things like college textbooks and other reference material. Now when you drag a stylus over some text, it instantly switches into selection mode and pops up the action menu as soon as the selection is done.