Google Play Books' arrival in India was merely the beginning of its effort to embrace Asia. Google progressed and gave 9 more Asian countries: Indonesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and New Zealand, the opportunity to buy books from Google.
After starting in these nine countries, the Google Play Books feature is now available in a total of 36 different countries. Book lovers from these countries can now gain access to the Play Books store straight from their mobile devices, whether iOS or Android-based. Although with the advancement of Google, if compared to the availability of the Amazon Kindle e-books, Play Books is still quite far behind.
Google Play Book is the world's largest selection of online books and according to Google, it has been slow but the service is steadily advancing in different parts of the world. Google Play Books says it offers millions of e-book titles from new releases and international bestsellers, as well as classics which can be purchased and read on any smartphone device or tablet.
The service offers e-books, millions of titles from new releases to classics, which can be purchased and read online, or on any smartphone and tablet.
Besides international content, some markets - New Zealand, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong - will also have localized content made available.
The company that claims the world's largest selection of online books has been slowly but surely making headway in spreading its Play products across the globe. Google Play Books is not available in all territories covered by Google Play Store for various legal or other reasons. Fortunately, Google seems to be quite intent in making its selection of books available to people in more countries. Although with the slow progress, Google appears to be keeping pace, having just brought Play Books to nine European countries in July.
People that have the access for Google's online bookstore can download the recently redesigned Google Play Books app and begin to browse through free and paid titles in the Books section of the Google Play Store.
Seen Features
Google revamped its Play Books app and makes this news even better. Users are not only able to read books purchased from Google in the cloud from anywhere, but their ePub and PDF files can be uploaded and added to their library, and the app syncs their place and bookmarks as a proper app should.
Through Google Play Books, users can browse books from Google Play Store on the web and through the Play Store app. It offers a mixture of free and paid e-books and is spread across various categories like Biographies & Memoirs, Business & Economics, Children's Books, Cooking, Fiction & Literature, Health, Mind & Body, History, Religion & Spirituality, Romance, and Technology & Engineering among others.
Note that this e-books section contains only novels and Google offers an separate app for magazines. E-books are shown in local currency pricing and the e-books are priced similar to Flipkart's Flyte and Amazon's Kindle store. Users can buy these books through a Google Wallet account, similar to how users currently purchase paid Android apps on Google Play.
Google Play Books offer features such as ability to sync the books read on multiple platforms, highlight, add a note, in-app dictionary, offline support, add a bookmark, dark and light theme, change font size, among others. The app also offers an option to read the text out loud both in online and offline mode.
Since Google also scans books as a part of its Google Books project, Google also offers original scanned pages on selected books.
Google also updated the Play Books app and fixed over 90 bugs with the app. These were issues related to the app crashing, User Interface improvements, the additions of a drop-down menu in the library to allow filtering books by type, and identifying place names on the current page when the reading controls are showing.
Among the Google Play media outlets, such as those for movies, magazines, music and TV shows, the e-book service seems to have the widest international reach. While it's not nearly at the same level with iBooks or Amazon's Kindle Store, it's quickly climbing the ladder.
At the same time, over the past few years, e-books have become more popular, although traditional printed tomes continue to be the solution for many of those who love reading. The popularity of stores such as Google Play Books has also helped with this.
The full list of countries where Google Play Books are available here along with the availability details of other Google Play content as well.