Thanks to the wonderful crew at
eBook Ninjas, I discovered that EPUB developers can upload and test their eBooks using
Google Play. See the attached thumbnail for a screenshot of their uploader.
From Google:
Quote:
Upload your personal documents to Google Play, and read them anywhere.
- Keep up to 1,000 EPUB or PDF files in Google Play for free.
- Upload from your computer or import from Google Drive.
- Read anywhere: in the web browser, on Android phones and tablets, or with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
- Page position, bookmarks, and notes are synced to the cloud, so you can pick up reading where you left off.
File size can't exceed 50MB, and it may take a few minutes to finish processing before you can read.
Make sure you have the appropriate rights to the uploaded content.
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I tested an EPUB I'm currently working on, and discovered a few things:
- It's best to wait a bit after uploading an EPUB before trying to open it in their viewer, otherwise you'll end up with a nasty error screen. The cover of your book also doesn't appear right away in the thumbnail preview of the book. I found that if I went somewhere else in Google Play and came back, everything seemed to work and appear properly.
- The fonts I embedded don't seem to be working. You can choose the font you want to view the book in, but there doesn't appear to be a way to turn on publisher settings.
- I ended up with several blank pages that do not appear under other platforms, such as Nook, ADE, Kindle, etc., that I've tested on.
Hopefully readers will find this useful. And apart from using Google Play on the web, this also works on mobile devices, so it should give any developer a real good idea how Google's Android book apps will render their EPUBs.