Google Play Books

Along with everything else going on at I/O yesterday–and continuing through to tomorrow–Google released an update to Play Books, that I think is pretty cool, too. The newest addition to Play Books is it’s ability to read EPUB and PDF. As stated in the “What’s new” section for Play Books’ info in the Play Store, one can simply add their documents via web at play.google.com/books/uploads. After a short wait for the document to upload–depending on your bandwidth and document sizes, of course–and a refresh of the library on your Android device, you’ll instamagically see the books that were uploaded; in my case, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet”.

The ability to save one’s own copies of books and read them via Play books is pretty slick; however, I do wish there were a few improvements…

It’d be nice to have a different interface for uploading these files; say via Google Drive. Instead of relying upon a browser based upload, I could just copy the files into a “special” folder in my Drive on my local machine.

It’d also be nice to see Play Books be able to read EPUBs and PDFs saved locally–or sent as attachments via whatever messaging/communication app/service on the Android device; currently Play Books will only read from the “cloud”.

…as it stands, however, the new update is something which I can take advantage of. Having these new abilities will enable me to easily upload books that I’ve collected for the children into their own accounts and have the content delivered “behind the scenes”; no longer relying upon third party apps.

[Until now, I had to connect their tablets and copy the documents over to their respective storage space, and then import each book individually into the reader app; there may have been an easier way–and likely was–but I hadn’t found it, yet.]

…I guess I need to see what other apps Google has updated, and what other fun stuff they have and will be announcing at I/O…