Google Play Books is the one app you need to buy and enjoy ebooks, audiobooks, comics, and manga.
Choose from millions of best selling ebooks, comics, manga, textbooks, and audiobooks. Download your book to read or listen on the go. When you’re finished, find your next favorite from recommendations personalized just for you. Buy audiobooks and ebooks as you go – with no subscription required.
Choose from millions of popular ebooks, audiobooks, and comics
* Buy ebooks and audiobooks as you go – no subscription required.
* Preview samples before you buy.
* Get extra discounts on select bundles.
* Receive emails or notifications about new releases from your favorite authors and when your wishlisted books go on sale.
* Earn Google Play Points with every purchase, then exchange them for Google Play credit.
* Receive notifications or emails for price drops in your samples and new releases from your favorite authors and series.
* Discover new releases, best sellers, and personalized recommendations across genres like romance, science fiction, mystery & thrillers, self-help, religion, nonfiction, and more.
Best in class reading and listening experience.
* Read or listen on Android, iOS, or your web browser, even when you’re offline.
* Pick up where you left off on any device.
* Customize your reading experience. Adjust the text size, font type, margins, text alignment, brightness, and background colors.
* Track your reading progress. See what percent you’ve read and how many pages you have left.
* Organize your library into shelves. Use the new shelves tab to curate your library by theme or genre. View your shelves across Android, iOS, and the web.
* Save to SD card. Choose to save your books to the device or an SD card, so you never run out of space.
* Use reading tools in children’s books to get kid-friendly word definitions, listen to specific words, or hear the book read aloud.
* Use Bubble Zoom for easier comic reading on a mobile device. Tap the page and watch your favorite comic or manga come to life.
* Take notes that sync with your Google Drive and share them with a group for easy collaboration.
* Look up definitions, get translations, save highlights, and bookmark your favorite pages while you read.
* Turn on Night Light to automatically adjust the background color and brightness or set the app to use the OS brightness.
Casual reading is great on this app, but I can’t say the same for textbook use. Searching for terms is a nightmare, especially if the term is widespread across the book. The search results show way too much information for each entry–and combine that with hundreds of them, it’s impossible to find the one entry you’re looking for.
App would be great if it could handle more than a 100 page book with no pictures. Even books I’ve downloaded offline take forever to load. I remember the earlier days of this app, and it’s somehow less functional than in 2015. It works just fine for smaller files, but even if it’s an offline download, it will take several minutes to fully load 20 pages of a textbook.
Landscape mode finally! The player itself is decent, though a little more customization would be nice–for example, the amount of rewind per click, or how much time back playback starts on app reopen. Still, it all works reliably, and the catalog is solid. And since I use the app primarily in my car, where I use my phone mostly in landscape mode, this one small addition is a boon to usability…
Easy to use… Easy to browse. I like that I can scroll through various lists and rating and price without needing to click individually (as is necessary on other apps such as Audible). There are also several filters that can be applied to quickly narrow down choices: trending, genre, rating, price, language, etc. My favorite app for audio books!!
Great, until it stopped functioning. I continually get a “This file couldn’t be uploaded. Check your internet connection and try again.” error trying to upload a book. I can’t find any info online how to fix it, so I have migrated to another app. I don’t want to delete and reinstall because I have too many books on here and don’t want to have to reload everything. You’d think Google could fix this kind of thing.
The basic reading function works well. Cannot add series to shelf or add tags to series, adding single books to shelf takes too long. Notifications (new book available, etc) have always been broken. In general discovering, buying and sorting books is harder than it should be. But at least I’ve never gotten a fake book on this platform so I still prefer it.
This is my favorite app to read books on out of any I’ve ever used but I do have an issue. Uploading is enabled yet I can’t upload, it says I have no internet connection but I do & everything else works. Tried clearing app cache, data and doing a clean install but no dice. Running Android 8.1 with Google Play Books version 2022.10.31.0.0 It doesn’t matter what I try to upload, nothing works and it did work in the past. I’m going to see if the web version offers a workaround for me for now.
Pros: some pretty good deals – especially if you’re a Google guide. They regularly offer discounts on reading material. Enormous selection. Cons: AND THIS IS HUGE!!! Continual scrolling isn’t available. You’ve to turn each page. It makes reading on a device choppy and detracts from the experience. The auto-read voice is legitimately disquieting. I would love to be able to change gender and accent. The app is average at best and needs some developer attention in order to level up.
I have enjoyed using Google Books since the beginning, the only issue I have is when using read aloud, the page in the viewer doesn’t always (or most often) stay synced with what is being read. Then if you stop, it returns to the page in the viewer, not where it stopped reading. Please fix… I do want to compliment the speech team, the synthesized voice is very good. It only stumbles on words with 2 pronunciations, like “live” or “minute”.
Alright experience. Good for reading non-fiction or fiction. Not good for music scores / textbooks but this is a problem with all e-books since there’s no way to annotate with pen. With pen annotation, ability to print and family library, this would be a great app. As it is, I only use it to reference music scores/textbooks when I travel – hard copy still require.
My experience with this app was super good when it still worked. I use it primarily to listen to audio books while I work, and that feature for me has inexplicably stopped working on my phone at all. It still does work on my laptop but that kinda defeats the purpose. I have enough storage to play the books but they just won’t. I’ve reached out about this and Google has kind of just done nothing about it. The E books are solid but Audible is probably where I should have gone.
Literally thee worst voice you could have made/chose. It’s comparable to nails on a chalkboard. I can say though that besides the absolutely mind numbing “read aloud” voice, the actual app does what it’s supposed to, I guess. It allows you to buy and store books and then read them. So if you came just to read the book, perfect app. Does everything you need. If you came for a cheaper option than Amazon or audible, then I apologize cause this couldn’t be a worse option unless you enjoy pain.
I love Google books, I love that I can tell my Google home to read my book to me. Lately though my audiobooks keep stopping for no reason mid sentence and I have to keep opening the app to restart it. It drives me crazy, I want to set it to play and do my work or drive. This used to be the best app, please fix it! Edited 09/22: The app works perfectly now!
I wish that Google Books offered more books in the original text, not just certain classics. For example, I have both The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, but I can only choose to read the former by its scanned pages. Also, the dictionary is extremely simplistic and does not offer all possible definitions for many common and uncommon words, which is a frustrating issue, especially when trying to determine context in philosophic works or even complex novels.
The highlight feature is needlessly complicated and broken. When you press and hold, it auto selects the single word. You then have to stop pressing and drag the little selector icons over the text you want to highlight. A little cumbersome. Where this becomes a real problem. Is highlighting any text on the bottom of a page. Selecting a single word ALSO gives you a pop up with the definition of that word. A pop-up that covers all of the next you want to highlight. So you’re literally unable.
Ok so this app was amazing but a few months ago my audiobooks stopped working. I love audiobooks,I used to play them in the car, in the shower or before bed but I can’t do that anymore. I contacted the developers and they told me it was a storage problem but I have an sd card and it has the space for it, just in case that wasn’t enough I bought google 1 storage. I’m at my wits end and im really frustrated. If nothing can be done I’d at least like a refund.
The app is pretty good in general. I took off two stars because of restrictions which makes taking notes harder. You can highlight passages from a book, annotate them, and sync these personal notes to a Google Doc. Unfortunately this only works for a small quantity of passages; which makes this feature useless! And the app also prevents you from copy/pasting into another app! Once again thwarting the serious reader who takes notes! One star off for each misfeature!
Some things I struggled with: The colors offered for the background, especially in night mode make my eyes hurt. I wish I there was an option for scroll-reading instead of page turning. The female robot voice for the “read aloud” option is strangely off-putting…especially when reading from a male perspective. Is there an option to change it? I also miss (from Kindle) that I’ve become used to is being able to see my clock in the corner. But I have enjoyed my books and the app in general!
Excellent reading app. Simple, clean, easy to navigate, and most importantly, reading books on your phone is amazing. Can easily access and start reading instantly. This app is made by Google, so the deals on books are always on, you can easily read anywhere, and payments are easy to make. Definitely recommend this top-tier reading application.
It does what it says it will, without issues. One thing I’ll truly miss is the tried n’ true Books 3D widget that stuck around for so long, because it was simply the BEST! What replaced it is an utterly horrific total waste of space one, instead of that ultra-intuitive bookstack one, which was fully resizable, could fill an entire page or just a corner, consisting 100% of the content. Also, book shortcut dims the book cover to make the 🟢 icon even bigger eye sore. Awful :((( why??? 🤔
It’s a great app that allows you to browse and purchase books online, and even allows for uploading locally downloaded as cloud backup. And it’s fairly simple to use as well. The problem I have with the app, however, is that it’s REALLY slow. Uploading books takes way too much time and fails too often, and—perhaps what bothers me most—there is VERY LITTLE room for customization. It doesn’t allow you to alter the margin, and the options it has for visual adjustments are simply too inflexible. 3⭐.
The read aloud feature is malfunctioning all of a sudden, updating the app didn’t make a difference…. The app is now constantly interrupting the read aloud for no reason – seems like every 1-2 pages, until the mobile phone is unlocked and navigated to the app. Sometimes even that does not help and the only option is to re-select the ‘read aloud’ function from the menu… Please fix that!
I love it. I don’t actually download books in here, in the app itself. But I find them on Google or elsewhere in a an epub format and then I upload them here and enjoy my experience a lot. I can highlight the parts that I think are beautifully written. I’m not a native English speaker, so if I encounter a word I don’t know the translation of, I immediately can find the description of it right away right there not leaving the app. It has the function to read aloud and lots of other features.
Awful I got my first book on this app, so I click into it to try and read but no writing shows up on the page for a good 2 minutes. Then when it did, it didn’t fit on the page/screen and half of the page was cut off the bottom of my screen. When I turned the page, it skipped a chunk of a paragraph. I don’t know if it’s something I did, or the device im reading on but I can’t tell a different since it’s my first time having this app. Please let me know if there’s something I could do differently
At first I didn’t want to use this app coz I thought it was going to be exclusively for ebooks purchased directly from the Playstore. But i was wrong. This app supports upload from external sources and as a reader, it’s perfect and have nearly all the features I could wish for. It has auto sync for notes and bookmarks. They offer some free books too. It’s now my default reader.
I’ve been trying to find an ePUB reader that allows synchronization across all devices and this is the one. Not only that, it’s really easy to add books especially from my computer. I get the books I want and then I throw them into Google Drive where it’s super easy to add to Google Books.
You guys need to take a page from Audible’s book and quit reorganizing a thing that works just fine. BUT! before you do that, make the “Library” tab and “Wish List” tab one section called “Your Stuff”, like in the Google TV app….that you created. It’s a similar to this in the Play Store, itself. Move the “Shop” tab (completely out of the app, ideally) over to the left of the “Home” tab, making the home tab the centerpiece. It looks like garbage the way it is.
I really like the service. Works on all platforms and tracks progress. The books, notes, highlights are synced and makes the whole experience really good. The above mentioned praises only work for file types other than PDF. The experience for pdf is not good, cannot highlight or take notes.
I would love to give this five stars as it was my go to app for reading epubs, but in the last twenty-fours hours it has begun displaying landscape mode in two columns and there appears no way to switch back to one column. I can’t read it like this, it is uncomfortable. If this is a glitch they need to fix it. I have automatic updates turned off, so if it was an update, how did this happen? If they don’t fix it, I will quit this app.
Looking for an alternative to Audible but it’s not GBooks. It seems the whole audio book scene is a hot mess of series, and no apps allow search excluding series. Stuff that’s presented as ‘free’ is really bait to get you to pay for the next book in the series. I’m happy, excited even, to pay for books. But I won’t buy into these never ending ‘cliff hanger’ sequel trips that have become standard fare. Depressing.
It is really one of my most favorite apps, it’s simple and that works for me. I am having an issue with the built-in dictionary,notes and bookmarks. Sometimes the dictionary doesn’t work even using with an internet connection, notes and bookmarks of some of my books are removed automatically too ! Edit : it’s working fine now
Pre-ordered a book, it drops, but I still can’t read it, I keep getting an error message. Turns out the purchase is pending, because it was a pre-order, and it’s gonna take 5 business days for the purchase to go through! THEN even when I get customer service to cancel the transaction so I can just redo the purchase, the system still registers the book as already owned! Is that still gonna take 5 days? Absolutely inefficient and mediocre.
When phone is in dark mode, some full color books (like children’s books) appear in inverted black & white, with no in-app way to correct. I shouldn’t have to change my phone’s appearance to read a book. Guess I’ll use that other e-book app unless this is fixed. EDIT: Per the response below, there are literally no in-app options available for adjusting the display, period, confirmed by a support specialist. The steps provided do not not work.
I have read too many of Don’s Mark Boland and Stony Man books to list them, they must add up to over a 100. This book is one of the best, full of exciting battles and suspence. A word of advice to those who intend to read it, allow yourself plenty of time to do it, because once you start doing so you won’t want to put it down until you have finished reading it.
I was excited to see that Google Play had my favorite series but I am very disappointed in the sound of the reader’s voice. I am blind and have to read audio books but I cannot enjoy my favorite book when the reader sounds so dreary and without emotion. I went to settings and turned on a more natural reading voice, it didn’t work. and I’m aware that it says that you have to be connected to the internet for it to work and yes I am.
I haven’t used the play books app in a about a year but, I was pleasantly surprised the app has a audio option built in so I don’t need to buy two versions of the book, that is excellent. The app is functional with decent settings. I’m sad I haven’t used it more.
Easily my favourite ereading app and experience. I especially enjoy the notes and highlights being saved to my Drive for easy reference and review. However there are two features that are closing in on deal breakers: 100mb upload limit and 1000 book limit. I have something like 6TB of Drive space; please allow Google One users the ability to utilize this space for their own Play Books uploads.
Please add split screen layout for galaxy fold. It’s the best device to read books on, but in regular handled mode it doesn’t divide the page into two to read like a book. The app splits the page in landscape mode, but it should also work in portrait. Or add a toggle so the user can adjust how it looks.
I’m trying to get up enough points so I can purchase this book. I did have enough points at one time but I didn’t know they were going to take most of the money away so now I’m trying to build it backup in time before they take the other money away so I can purchase this book it seems like it’s a really good and enlightening and encouraging book it’s very inspirational also. At least the part that I’ve read. Thank you
It’s a fine app, and useful for many different things, but the extremely large page numbers on the scroll bars of all PDF documents are very distracting, and the lack of any way to turn those off us an oversight on the Play Books team’s part. Even more inconvenient than that is the fact that Play Books doesn’t allow users to change the reading voice for reading books aloud. When the Play Books team updates this deficiency, to allow users to choose the reading voice, it deserves 5 stars.