Google Play Books - Now with added awesome

[timeslip1974]

New version of Google play books is out - FINALLY with ability to upload your own EPUBS and a cloud save facility for upto 1000 books.....

... In my opinion that pretty much kills all the competition stone cold dead

[Teknikal]

Originally Posted by timeslip1974

New version of Google play books is out - FINALLY with ability to upload your own EPUBS and a cloud save facility for upto 1000 books.....

... In my opinion that pretty much kills all the competition stone cold dead

It is very good I was just playing with it but I'm going to keep with Mantano I think mainly for the tags and series info.
I'd say Google books is probably good enough to keep most people happy and I can see myself buying a book or two on it as well for it's convenience factor.

[timeslip1974]

Doesnt Mantano charge for its cloud services tho ?

[Teknikal]

Originally Posted by timeslip1974

Doesnt Mantano charge for its cloud services tho ?

Yeah although maybe this might change that, to me I just like Mantano and the way I can view the series order, add my own fonts and customise the look is important to me.

I'm also really disliking how big Googles icons are lately, it makes things much harder to browse or look through, it's the same with google Play search results gigantic icons and hardly any useful details you need to scroll for a long long time to find anything so I think Mantano still has a huge advantage in viewing the library.

[foosion]

One problem is that Google limits each book to 50mb. I have some books with illustrations that are much larger.

Otherwise, it's a very nice product. Syncing across devices is good - read up to page 75 on one device and it open on page 75 on other devices.

[bfollowell]

Does this reader support embedded fonts?

[glnnjnsn]

I was excited when I saw the update notification and saw the new features.
The upload ability is a big improvement, but it still falls a little short. From my experience so far, you can't have DRM of any type - so I still can't use it to read my purchases from Amazon/B&N without stripping them of DRM first. I'm also suspecting I'd have trouble viewing books I've checked out with Overdrive. But, it does functionally obsolete the main reason why I would be looking at readers like Montano, Aldiko, and Moon+.

Since the Help section doesn't seem to cover the specifics yet, I figured I'd see if they go into detail about the changes during the Google Play sessions at I/O today.

[tomsem]

It also has some ePub3 support, colored highlights, Translate, Explore (wikipedia, google maps).

[timeslip1974]

im very much digging the ability to seemlessly go from reading on my phone or tablet then on my pc via chrome and vice versa

[ddavtian]

Originally Posted by glnnjnsn

... it still falls a little short. From my experience so far, you can't have DRM of any type - so I still can't use it to read my purchases from Amazon/B&N without stripping them of DRM first.

How can another company's app (especially a competitor app) read Amazon books? It's not like Amazon allows Google to read its books in Play and Google was lazy to implement that.

[Namekuseijin]

Originally Posted by timeslip1974

New version of Google play books is out - FINALLY with ability to upload your own EPUBS and a cloud save facility for upto 1000 books.....

... In my opinion that pretty much kills all the competition stone cold dead

in my opinion this sucks so much it isn't even funny

I bought an ebook from Google Play and my impression is that it downloads each page on page turns: it turns slowly and I see the 3G connection being used. I hate cloudy days!

Why should I use cloud when a whole library of hundreds of ebooks doesn't take even a fraction of 1GB in devices that come with more and more storage? Why all this storage if it's supposed to be empty? Don't you guys see this is just to take away your claims to property over things you "buy"?

plus, don't you find it ridiculous that to read the books already in your device that you should upload them, one-by-one?!

ostrageously dumb...

That's Aldiko for me. And I hope they can allow me to take the epub from the book I bought and actually read it as it should be read...

[glnnjnsn]

Originally Posted by ddavtian

How can another company's app (especially a competitor app) read Amazon books? It's not like Amazon allows Google to read its books in Play and Google was lazy to implement that.

I wasn't implying that Google was somehow lazy. Far from it - which I think was well indicated by the part of the sentence you've left unquoted.

The app does, however, lack something I would like to see. After all, I *can* currently use the Nook app to read DRM-protected epubs purchased from Google Play but not vice versa. And I don't think it's unreasonable (if perhaps naive or overly optimistic) to want to be able to read ALL my e-book acquisitions from a single reading app.

And while being able to integrate Amazon purchases into the mix would be the biggest hurdle to overcome, it's certainly not impossible.

[cfrizz]

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

in my opinion this sucks so much it isn't even funny

I bought an ebook from Google Play and my impression is that it downloads each page on page turns: it turns slowly and I see the 3G connection being used. I hate cloudy days!

Why should I use cloud when a whole library of hundreds of ebooks doesn't take even a fraction of 1GB in devices that come with more and more storage? Why all this storage if it's supposed to be empty? Don't you guys see this is just to take away your claims to property over things you "buy"?

plus, don't you find it ridiculous that to read the books already in your device that you should upload them, one-by-one?!

ostrageously dumb...

That's Aldiko for me. And I hope they can allow me to take the epub from the book I bought and actually read it as it should be read...

This is how I feel as well. Either get a large enough reader or get one that has expandable memory and you don't have to depend on anyones cloud!

[kyrilson]

I'm very pleased with this latest update. Not being able to sideload is the primary criteria that has kept me from using Google Play Books app as my primary reading app on Android. That changes now! Smart move by Google.

[Teknikal]

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

in my opinion this sucks so much it isn't even funny

I bought an ebook from Google Play and my impression is that it downloads each page on page turns: it turns slowly and I see the 3G connection being used. I hate cloudy days!

Why should I use cloud when a whole library of hundreds of ebooks doesn't take even a fraction of 1GB in devices that come with more and more storage? Why all this storage if it's supposed to be empty? Don't you guys see this is just to take away your claims to property over things you "buy"?

plus, don't you find it ridiculous that to read the books already in your device that you should upload them, one-by-one?!

I agree with you about the slowness and if the cloud isn't fast enough for books it definitely isn't fast enough for videos or other media, no doubt as well as being slow it will drain the battery much faster.

The fix is to store the book locally just click the book info and choose store locally or pin it and you will see the book downloading and being stored locally, I'm not keen on uploading books either one by one and that in part is why I won't be using it.