Google Play Books & Audiobooks
reviews and complaints

This is a serviceable barebones e-reader if you have to read a documents that isn't available in PDF or on Amazon Kindle. However, basic note-taking functionality is always broken on the iPad app. It is sometimes difficult to make notes and highlights; other times it's impossible. It's never easy. The text display is often not aligned with where the app thinks your fingers / pencil is, so it highlights the incorrect word. Adjusting the highlight is miserable because you have to grab the tiny circle at one end of the highlight and pull it, but this is very hard to do because the circle is not displayed in the right place. In addition, the pop up display for highlights and notes only shows up sometimes, and in many cases appears on top of the circle you are trying to move to adjust the text. Usually the result is that you cancel your own highlight and have to start over. If you succeed in getting the touch screen to register that you are trying to make a note and then manage to type your note in and save it, there's no guarantee you'll ever see it again: sometimes it fails to sync, other times it appears to be saved in your list of notes but doesn't appear on the screen when you look at the text.

I had been reading a public domain book in ePub format ("1984" by George Orwell, provided by Adelaide Univ.) using iBooks. I wished its sharing features were better, so I decided to try Google Play Books (GPB). Adding the book to the app was easy, but slower. The display of the book is not as good, though. iBooks shows the cover and title pages independently, as they should be. GPB doesn't, so it looks cheap. Making marks and notes in GPB is tedious. The selection of text ideas slow, changing a highlighted selection is impossible (it must be deleted and recreated), adding a note to an existing highlight isn't possible, selecting text on an existing highlight (to look up in the dictionary or online) is impossible, etc. Changing the orientation of the screen or the size of the font sets off a slow recalculation of what GPB should show on the screen, which is updated after several seconds. I've found that in some situations, it's important to have rotation lock enabled to avoid this slowness if my device angle happens to change just enough to trigger a rotation. However, I wish GPB would let me lock it into landscape mode sometimes.

I expected a LOT better from Google than this. It's very disappointing.

The bad:
-auto-jumps to what the app considers an opening page for the text-sometimes skipping introductions and biographies, or whole chapters! I want to be able to turn this off and begin with the cover

-no note-taking or text-sharing features

-no video out (I'm a teacher and would love to be able to share this app and these books with my kids. Imagine lesson plans comparing Punch from 1890 with magazines of today!) Goodreader and several other apps have video out now

-no landscape two-page mode like you can find on Kindle, Zinio, Goodreader, iBooks, and several other apps

Fix these and get five stars!

The good:
-enabling scanned pages-feels like a real book and many books are designed by authors to have specific text features

-also the best app for reading poetry as originally printed

-great selection of pay and free literature, and the free stuff is head and shoulders above Kindle offerings, at least in terms of grammar and spelling (I've had to STOP reading some Kindle books because nobody bothered to edit them for errors and the amt of misakes made them impossible to read!)

The end:
Will use this app in conjunction with Kindle, Stanza, and Goodreader, but as yet all have their pros and cons

I wish I could give less than one star. Attempting to use google books was the most frustrating and disappointing experience I have had on my iPad EVER- and it cost me money to learn this little fact.

If you own an iPad do yourself a favor, avoid google like the plague until they get their head out of their butt. This app DOES NOT WORK RELIABLY ON THE IPAD AND GOOGE EBOOK CUSTOMER SERVICE IS UNRESPONSIVE AND LESS THAN HELPFUL

After buying a title from the google store via their "app" it took several logouts to get it to show up in the app. When it finally did show up, it would not go past page 25 ( this was a full purchase not the sample version). Two hours of searching their "support" yielded only one suggestion - ignore the app and read over the web. BRILLIANT... I BOUGHT THE BOOK TO READ IN THE PARK WHERE THERE IS NO INTERNET! (btw I relogged, resynched, removed, redownloaded, reinstalled the app and every other thing I could try... No joy)

I have sent emails, placed forum posts, reported book problems, messages to tech support, messages to customer service and absolutely NOTHING FROM GOOGLE

DO NOT USE THE GOOGLE APP UNLESS YOU LIKE BEING DISAPPOINTED, UPSET, AND RIPPED OFF OF YOUR HARD EARNED MONEY!

I'm a college student running Google Books alongside Kindle and iBooks on my iPad. I've purchased books in all three. I think it's a great app headed in the right direction, but it has 4 main problems:

1. Google Books doesn't allow you to bookmark a page.
2. Sometimes when you close and reopen the app, it shuffles your page to somewhere nearby. Thus, every time you leave for a moment you spend your first minute shuffling through trying to remember where you were last. This gets frustrating if you multi-task on your iPad.
3. When you check your chapter location using the scroll bar at the bottom left, if you jiggle at all it will suddenly scroll you to another page, so you can't check what chapter without risking being sent somewhere else.
4. The online storage of your book sometimes means you can't access more of it if you're away from a live wifi connection, whereas Kindle and iBooks are stored locally on your device.

Google's on the right track and I'm sure future versions will incorporate more features, but for now I find the frequent page-losing a barrier to me loving it. I currently prefer Kindle and iBooks because of the nice bookmarks and the fact that I can read my books even sitting in the middle of a park with no wifi. With a few changes I'm sure I'll love it.

I generally have faith that Google will eventually commit to delivering quality and value, but this ain't there yet.

For the app itself, I haven't used it much yet, but it seems very bare-bones.

More bothersome is their ebook store, which is *reallybad right now. Not only do you have to log into the app, but if you want to browse or get books, you get kicked out to Safari, where you have to log in all over again (*ahem*, in-app browser, anyone?).

And then from there...good luck! I wanted to download some Sherlock Holmes books, and hence searched on obvious terms like author, title, etc. Occasionally I got some relevant results, but they were buried amongst a mountain of utterly irrelevant results, sorted in no apparent order. If you then click the button to only show "Free" titles -- well, the system seems to regurgitate every single piece of public-domain junk ever, regardless of relevance. Such as 19th-century legal documents! Gimme a break!

In short, trying to find anything in the "store" is really more like rummaging through the forgotten discards room of a disused thrift store, with the lights off. A frustrating and fruitless waste of time. (I.e., Google, if my search has few or no results to return, I would vastly prefer that you be *honestabout it and not invite me to waste my time paging through irrelevant dross!)

Updated Updated Review: The latest update has rendered this app all but unusable. The highlighting and note-taking functionality seems to have returned, but now the app crashes halfway through the download when downloading a larger file. Uninstalling and reinstalling the app does nothing to correct the issue. I seem to be stuck with over two hundred purchased books that I am unable to read with this app. Perhaps I should ask Google for a refund of the purchase price of these books… /s

Updated Review: The latest release has corrected the issues with font size and line spacing, but has also added several new bugs. It is now seemingly impossible to remove the highlighting from highlighted text, and the app has begun crashing or displaying blank pages on a regular basis. One would think that the developers would be able to create a functional app. Perhaps it's a matter of job security…

Original Review: This app has always had issues. It's extremely slow to download books, and the dictionary and translation functions have been seriously downgraded in the last few updates.
Unfortunately, the update to iOS 10.0.1 has introduced a new bug to Google Play Books on my iPad Mini 3—I can no longer adjust the font size and the line spacing within a page.
This could be a good app, if only Google's developers would give it the attention that it deserves.

I used to love this app, where I've stored a lot of books.
But now Google has turned this app to cr*p, and I'm afraid my poor books are doomed.

Why? Because every time I start the app, it crashes, says sorry, and then does it again, even after I delete it and reinstall.

And when, oh Google coders, your software begins to cause odors, your stock will fall down, and down, and down, until alas, Google will be over.

Fix your bugs before shipping software.

Oh GOOOOGLE, where are you? Helooooooo GOOOOOOOGLE, WHERE ARE YOU?

Gosh, that's not working. How can we request that Apple take this garbage Play Books app out of the store? Maybe a thousand small claims cases against Google will get their attention? Maybe a story on bad apps on Nightline? Goodness, this may be futile, and just as in No Exit, which I can't read here because of GOOOOGLE, we're all doomed to a hopeless eternity in the bleak, repetitive nothingness of the app store, hemmed in by its four grey corners, as sad as an overcast day, waiting for something to change, praying for a bug fix, oblivious to the hard, miserable, brutal truth of technology: there is no customer support. No, pressing the star key will not take you back to the previous menu. You, like me, are stuck in a land with no future bug fixes, from which there is ... No Exit! (Cue tremolo strings and dissonant 1950 era brass chords.)

Been using this to read a bestseller technical book for the past 3 months. I've observed the following issues so far:

1. Highlight colors mismatch: I use both web browser version and iOS to read for convenience. When I highlight using blue or red in web browser, the highlights are displayed as green or yellow in iOS app. This is really annoying because I highlight a different category of things in green/yellow. This mixes them up. This is a really small but obvious and disturbing friction for users.

2. Images disappear: I paid $33 for the ebook, the same price as its paper copy. This I'm expecting the same content. However, certain images are not available in iOS app.

3. Highlight "wiggles": countless times when I highlighted, either a word or a sentence, the highlight would wiggle. For example, if a word appears in both the subtitle and the paragraph, when I highlight the one in the paragraph, the highlight would show up on the subtitle. When I highlight a sentence, the highlight will be displayed off by several words or even characters.

4. Highlight disappears: when the highlights don't wiggle, they would sometimes disappear. They'll still show up in the list of notes, but they stay invisible on the page. They GHOST you.

5. My thumbs are too tired to type more but I'm sure I observed more... I rarely rate apps, let alone writing a review this long, but 4.6/5 is beyond inconceivable.

I have had an Android Samsung tablet for a few years now and been using google play books ever since I got the tablet. So I have a lot of books in my library that I accumulated over the years. Books that I bought from google store as ePub file formats and, ones I uploaded my self as PDFs.

I personally became fond of the app for organization and style! So when I bought a new iPad and set it up I, was glad to see the google play books app on apple App Store so I immediately downloaded the app to retrieve my books, as I am not a fan of the iBooks app.

Sorry for the irrelevant introduction; for me the app looks nice and familiar and it works just fine with no issues but, the reason I gave the app two stars is because I noticed that when I downloaded a pdf book that is only 38 Mb in size, it took 1.5 Gb of storage while ePub books didn’t take much.

There probably is a conversion factor however, as far as I know that apple devices are able to read PDFs even though ePubs are the most popular nowadays!

So if there is a conversion factor, why convert a pdf in the first place if an iPad is able to read it? Why not just download it as it is to read? And if a pdf is not being converted, why is it taking 1.5Gb of storage for a book that is only 38Mb in size to download?

I don’t know if this is a fault on playbooks app side or apple side! Either way it is ridiculous and I hope it gets addressed somehow.

This book reading software is someplace between okay and awful, depending on what you are doing. In summary, it is good if you have to buy a book from Google because of availability, for example. Google does availability of rare books most excellently. More specifically about the reading software, when flowing the text, it cuts off photos and often creates terrible page breaks for mixed images and text, sometimes giving you a blank page in the middle of a chapter. You often see just the top part of an image at the bottom of a page. The bottom of the image goes missing. It then tries to tell you the page you would be on if you were reading the printed book, or the book as scanned pages, which is rather pointless. When using the scanned pages option, it renders a book just fine. There is no highlighting, annotating or bookmarking. When you tap the info button you sometimes get the really useful message, "(null)", which is sort of like bragging about missing information. The table of contents works well. Finding works fast. The navigation slider shows the page number and chapter, and works precisely. Night reading? While, white-on-black is blinding for some, the feature works fine. The online personal library works nicely, so you can access your books online when you have an Internet connection. You can also download your books. This book rendering software is okay if you need it to read rare books available only from Google. It needs highlighting, bookmarking and annotating.

If a highlight is created in “flowing text” view, when switching to “original pages” view, the highlight doesn’t show up.

Using the Get Help feature to try and find a solution to this comes up with nothing, and trying to find an email address or a way to directly contact an actual support representative or a support forum or message board seems impossible.

I like using the app, it’s quite useful and well thought out. But there’s inconsistency in the way creating highlights works.

I thought it would be pretty simple to contact Google support about this to see if there is a way to fix the problem, but the get help function in the app and on the Google Play website is about as helpful as talking to an employee at a retail store who simply tells you to read the package if you have a question, and if you have questions about what you’re reading, then they just read the package to you as if that would help.

From a mega company like Google I think this is a pretty sad example of what “Help” looks like for an iOS App. It’s pretty clear that they don’t want anyone to ask questions or point out design flaws. Therefore, here’s One Star.

Yes, it’s a “Free” app, but after spending over $100 on books in the Google Play Store, I think it’s reasonable to expect a much better way of actually getting a real person to help if things aren’t working the way they are supposed to.

Compare this to the Amazon Kindle App where you can actually start a chat support session within minutes about problems with the app or with the books, and they try to work it out immediately and will even process a refund in the same moment if things don’t work out.

I use this & Apple Books. I also tested kindle I could mention the problems with it. But I most likely will be repeating what most have said before. What I will say google books is easy to navigate so far I find the same books here as on Apple Books. Kindle is missing some books. Google books has a far better feature for comics then Amazon’s comixology. Which I’ll warn at this point that app as gone done hill. Google as audio books it’s not like audible. It’s good has simple features that are useful. So if you need a second book app I say give this a try. Cause is just one app you need vs having total of 4 kindle, comixology, audible, & goodreads (which this app does reviews & recommendations, overall this app covers books in kindle more. Not very useful.) Last when you add your books the recommendations it’s make is good. UPDATE: I just noticed something the average difference between (some of the books) the number Book pages between Apple Books and Google Books is about 60 pages. While the average difference between the number of book pages between Apple Books and Kindle is about 40-46 pages. If I had to say, which one of the three does the best job on book recommendations I say Google play books, Kindle, & Apple Books.

(Forgot to add this:Google play books has a thing to where you go on the website and you can bundle package some books or all the books in a series in one purchase.If it’s a continuing series you can purchase a so call subscription to where you can get a new book each time a new one comes out. Kindle/Amazon has a bundle feature, but it’s only for three books.Apple Books doesn’t have any of those things the other two have.)

COLONEL WALTER CUNNINGHAM, USMCR (Ret.); Apollo 7 Lunar Module Pilot conveys all of the truths and emotions of what life as an astronaut was like during the early NASA Manned Space Program. “THE ALL AMERICAN BOYS” captures the inner spirit and tenacity of our early space pioneers thru this in-depth personal memoir! It examines the incredible risk that was exposed in many space flight missions; Project Mercury, Project Gemini, and ultimate success thru all of the Project Apollo space flights. The loss of fellow “Astros” during training hops in T-38’s and the untimely deaths of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee during the Apollo 1 “plugs-out” test on the launch pad is vividly discussed and examined as horrible tragedies. Both hard copy book and audiobook (narrated by Colonel Cunningham himself) is extremely in-captivating and very well presented. Both formats are a tribute to the lives, sacrifices, and determination of a special group of men selected by NASA to achieve one of the greatest scientific human achievements of all time; to place a man on the surface of the moon and return him safely to the Earth before the end of the decade. The challenge spoken by President John F. Kennedy in the early 1960’s was met and ultimately task accomplished on July 20, 1969 with the success of the Apollo 11 First Lunar Landing. Colonel Cunningham’s story is told with a no-holds barred approach and written with sincere conviction. A must read for all ages and a documented account of great men putting risk aside and getting the job done by doing whatever it takes to achieve success in their missions. Thank you Colonel Cunningham for everything you have done to ensure the tremendous successes of the American Manned Space Program and your commitment to a grateful Nation! God Bless and Godspeed always!
SEMPER FIDELIS!

I use my iPad for all my e-reading, mainly using the Kindle app with the occasional iBooks purchase. Google Books is another potential outlet I'd consider, but first it's missing some key features from its iPad app (or if these features exist, I can't figure out how to find them). First, there's no user-placed bookmarks! It autosaves where you were when you closed it, but if you want to bookmark favorite chapters or something to go back to for reference later, you can't. Second, there's no landscape mode. Third, there's no highlighting or note-taking ability. Fourth, it lacks the dictionary feature of the Kindle app, which iBooks does not have either.

On the plus side, Google Books has a magnifying glass feature where if you hold down your finger on a section, it will zoom in on about four lines of text. While I won't use this feature, I can see how it could be helpful for someone like my father who wouldn't want to squint at a small screen. It also has a cool line-spacing option which its competitors seem to lack. The night reading mode is helpful and not present in iBooks, though the Kindle app has it too.

When it comes to book selection, it seems Google Books trails the Kindle store considerably. Maybe it's to be expected since the service just launched, but right now you have a greater chance of finding what you want on the Kindle store. In terms of pricing, there's fluctuation. I've seen books a few dollars more expensive on the Google Bookstore, I've seen similar pricing, and I've seen books cheaper on the Google Bookstore (compared to the Kindle store). Cost-conscious customers may want to 'shop around' for the best deal.

If Google Books updates its iPad app with the missing features which competitors have and improves the selection, I'll revise this review and upgrade the score accordingly. It's a solid first effort, but they're playing catchup right now.

I love reading google books on my iPad and I've only worked with free books so far (free Google Books) so the previous suggestions about the highlighting and book marking options really weren't an issue for me. I peruse old books for genealogy research, historical cookbooks, and old-school medical references, and while those options could be helpful, I haven't run into any situations were I was inconvenienced by not having them with what I use Google Books for. If I were actually buying my books through Google Books, I could definitely see that as an annoyance.

My only real complaints are the lack of organizational features for downloaded works and not having an option to download multiple works at one time.

If I go through the Google Books website, books are easier to locate and organize, but you need to access the book through the app if you want to read it through the app. Personally, I like the setup when reading through the app vs the website. The app only allows for options to archive or remove, which makes things a little more difficult for me to locate what I am looking for when I need it. An option to add folders would be awesome.

Since each book must be purchased through the website before landing in your app bookshelf, and then downloaded before you can read it, I tend to do multiple searches and "purchases" (just the necessary motions even if the book is free), and then have to download each book, one at a time, which can be a real pain. Most opportunities that I have to read what I've downloaded come along when I'm on the go and don't have Internet access, so I have to plan ahead and download the books in advance. If I could sync the app shelf automatically with my purchases or download all at once, it would be really convenient for me. Then I could remove them when I'm done...even if that is still one by one.

I guess I don't really have complaints, they're more like suggestions. Otherwise, the app is awesome.

I started buying my books on Play Books because when they say a book doesn't have DRM it actually doesn't have it, unlike Kindle. Another plus over Kindle is Latin is an option for translation and the current series I'm reading -Terra Ignota- makes that a highly useful feature. Books also keeps my current reading place well cross-platform.

Unfortunately, the iOS version of Play Books is disappointing. Besides it just not being a very nice looking app, and lacking some options with selected text (please automatically display a definition when I select a word - an obvious missing - and I’d like to be able to share definitions, translations, etc. of selected text), the worst part for me is the highlighting feature is completely screwed up.

I use highlighting a lot. When I look a word up I like to review them later so I use a color for that; then a color for grammar or spelling mistakes, another for storyological problems. I can reproduce a few different highlighting issues.

Selecting a word and looking it up often unselects it in terms of the color and handles but not for 'real'. If I then press a highlight color the highlight remains invisible but the tool shows the highlight as being removable with the x. Other times after the definition lookup the word appears highlighted by a color but is not and I have to select it then highlight then remove the highlight to clear it completely. Leaving a page and coming back often dumps the highlights. Sometimes highlighting a word causes other highlights to appear on the page, which I never made, including partial words, even through page turns. And the highlights made on iOS Books do not reliably appear when I check them on Android, though they seem to be fine in the other direction - Android to iOS.

I had hoped this latest app updates would solve the issue but it didn't. If I want to read the book and have the highlights work I can always use the Android version but that is frustrating to have to switch platforms. I need the highlighting to work properly on iOS please.

Another Google app filled to the brim with bugs. Highlighting is a cursed feature that is in desperate need of real dev attention. Best way to describe my experience is glitchy and fiddly.

About 1 every 4 times, opening the app goes to an indefinite black screen. Leaving the app for over 10 minutes did nothing.
Many times, if you open the app and the page it opens to has highlights, it’ll show ONLY the highlighted marks but none of the text.
Highlighting sometimes will refuse to highlight specific words causing the user to have to select a different word in order to continue to use the highlight feature. Once the app picks a word to avoid, it becomes set in stone.
Highlight color hit box is waaay too small. More of the time than not my finger touch will be perceived as a click outside the color swab which closes the color selection window.
Sometimes even if you click directly on the color, the app will not display the highlight. If you continue to try and try, the highlights won’t show but will continue to stack on each other until the user force quits and reopens the app. Then the app will show EVERY highlight attempt stacked up. Smh
More of an opinion.. Devs should really consider rethinking the way the highlight menu shows up. There is just no need to have it obnoxiously follow the users finger. Pick a location opposite of where the user is highlighting and put the menu there. This may help create a more relaxed reading environment.

Not unlike all the other Google apps I use, this one has broken basic functionality. The reading experience is made to be frustrating and constantly taking the user out of their focus on what they are reading to have to baby this app into doing what is basic.

Please note: I do copy all my Google reviews as in the past Google has had a habit with deleting reviews listing bugs rather than just resolving them. Because of this bad behavior I take the steps necessary to keep the unresolved glitches publicly known until Google decides to actually do something positive for a change. This back and forth has been going on for several years now. To my outsider perspective, this comes off of as nothing but lazy.

After purchasing two text books on Google Play Books for the current semester, I’ve come to realize that this is not a good app for students.

There are good things: the search is powerful, as one would expect from a Google product, and the navigation is easy.

Unfortunately, problems make the app unusable. The syncing of those highlights from the web version shifted by a word or two. The highlighting process is slow and resets the view to the top of the page after each highlight.

But most frustratingly, the app regularly freezes and shuts down when navigating notes and highlights. This particularly frustrating when attempting to reference notes that have already been taken.

This is a well-reviewed app, and I’m sure it’s great for casual reading, but if you would like to have your textbooks on your iPad, don’t rely on it. You’ll only be left angry and wanting to throw your iPad out the window.

So you say you bought books from Google and want to read those items via the Google Books application on your iOS device of choice?

Too bad.

You see, this application doesn't even let you read those books properly, because every time you close out the application has to upgrade your entire library.

What? Patches for BOOKS?

Even if you've downloaded the items to YOUR DEVICE- they are supposedly ON YOUR DEVICE, you WILL encounter that upgrading BS.

Past not being able to read books you bought from Google, they took away the dictionary feature.

WHAT!

Suffice to say I'll never buy another book from these hacks (pun intended) ever again.

This is one of those apps that need to be pulled right away, because it simply does not work as advertised.

How do you screw something up this bad and not seek to fix it right away?

And it's been MONTHS.

Also, get out of San Francisco, Google!

UPDATE

It works... For now

I use Google Play Books (GPB) in the hopes of keeping my books all in one play and access them from my devices, whether Android or iOS. Uploading books in PDF's or ePub from a computer is fine and I can see them all from any device. It's downloading to a device for reading that's a HUGE disappointment. It takes forever on a fast WiFi connection and seems to just hang. I don't use the highlighting feature all that much so I can't comment on it. But for my purpose of keeping books in one place and reading them on multiple devices, this fails miserably since it's so SLOOOOW. Keep in mind this is on a fast connection on a newer device (iPad Pro) so this shouldn't be happening. It's Google Play Books because I can download Netflix movies super fast, stream 4K/HD content without hiccups, etc. so this slowness is only in Google Play Books. Back to iBooks for me I guess, which is fine by does not have the features I need.

Browse, download a sample, then buy a book after reading the sample. Easy, right? Amazon has mastered this to a science with its website and Kindle reader. Not so Google Play Books and its phone app. After searching or browsing and downloading a sample on the phone version of the Google Play Store there is no link to get from the sample you read to the page where you pay for the book whose sample you have just read. In fact, you will find it challenging to find the same book again, if there are multiple versions of the same title in different languages. The book description summary is insufficient to determine whether the book you are about to purchase is the same one you read a sample of. Language, color/black and white, and other such helpful descriptors are absent. So the conversion process from a search to a sale is broken. As other reviews point out, Google Play has more variety, but what good is it if it’s a hassle to purchase a book?

4/26: Another year, another one star rating. Forced to get an ebook the other day through this dreadful app. The book STILL won't download to my ipad.

4/27: A year and a half later and this app is still terrible, possibly even worse than Overdrive, and that's bad. Can't download books easily, they keep disappearing, prices are high -- nothing good about this app. Only use it when the book I need isn't available otherwise. This is just venting since the app developers obviously can't be bothered to read the myriad of complaints.

12/14: still 1*, still buggy as all get out, STILL having to redownload my books. Google - won't be buying any more of your books till you fix this.

Have had & tried to use this app for a couple of years and it still stinks. Biggest headache is the endless redownloading of purchased books. Too bad because Play's library is amazing.

FYI many if not all Play books will work on Bluefire or a PDF reader like Goodreader.

In the app, everytime when using the translate function to translate one language to Chinese, it goes to the simplify Chinese automatically. This does not happen to any other language but Chinese. Because me to have to go back to scroll all the way up to find traditional Chinese however the next word when I try to translate it will automatically switch back to simplified Chinese. Even though there are similarities to use traditional and simplified Chinese but a lot of simplified version it’s hard for a traditional Chinese reader to understand. This also happened to Google translate app and Google translate website.As if Google has set the default “simplify Chinese” as the mainstream Chinese. Even though there may be more user of simplified Chinese but I believe that their system could do better as this does not happen to any other language. This is very disappointing and I will not purchase any other book from Google play as I have refrain from using Google translate until this feature is improved.

As a long standing iBooks user, I grudgingly installed this app in order to read a book I needed for work that was only available in Google Play. The experience has been awful. Functionally, the ability I have to annotate, define words or even to simply navigate are nowhere near the ease and sophistication of iBooks.

When making a book purchase the first time, you are forced to establish a Google Wallet. (I really hate the idea of another stored credit card) Once the purchase is made, the book is then deposited into your online library. I suppose I should have read the fine print better, because from there you are stuck. Initially, I believed I would be able to download an ePub version of the book like other online eBook providers. Obviously this is not the case. Why the particular author of this book, chose Google Play as the only eBook distributor is beyond me. The difficulty in interacting with the book severely hampers the quality of the content.

This is the first and last time I will use this ecosystem and app.

This app is ok- I got it to be able to read a book that was not available digitally anywhere else, but there needs to be more control over what the book looks like while you are reading. For example -- it should allow different background colors and brightness control to different situations. It's difficult to read with the white background being so bright... And the dark background setting is better but not adjustable. I'm glad they had the book I was looking for but the book has issues with flowing text- some of the letters switch - for example- all the r's are showing up as t's! very annoying! Especially for a book I paid for. If this book was available digitally somewhere else I would have bought it there. Also why not allow the scanned pages version to be opened as a zoom able PDF in adobe reader? That would solve a lot of issues, like not being able to zoom scanned pages. This app needs a lot of improvement. Not sure what google is thinking here, maybe they are just not paying attention to it or updating it anymore. A shame.

As a student and long-time user of the Kindle app, I was attracted to Google books because of the option of reading your books either as "flowing text" (which is to say as standard e-books, with adjustable font sizes and the ability to use your system's text-to-speech engine) or as "scanned pages," which look identical to the print version of the book (especially useful when you are writing academic papers, and would rather reference a page number than a Kindle location). Also there are many books available in the Play Store that are not available for Kindle. Unfortunately, the iOS app is garbage. First, downloading books is a pain. It takes several tries before finally downloading. Then opening and using the books is a downright nightmare. I've been trying for the last half forty-five minutes to open a book I just bought, and it's just not working. First it gives me a blank page with a spinwheel inside. Then finally text. But when I try to turn the page it crashes. Not cool, Google. You took my money, now I want to read my book. Please fix.

I’m trying this app out because I’m doing battage of the books so I need something that has all the books that are mostly free, my friends on my team are gonna get this so I’m super excited to try it out!
5 days later~
This app is horrible! I was using my school account cause I didn’t have another one and so did and so did my friends some bug got into all of our accounts and it stated that we had been hacked, if you are gonna get this app, DONT! And if you are gonna get it anyways, PLEASE DONT USE A SCHOOL OR PERSONAL ACCOUNT! Make a new one. It was all so horrible what happened to me and my friends so please take my advice and don’t get this app. I’m so disappointed and dissatisfied. I was so excited to try this app and now this makes me sick. I have been experiencing glitches on my school account ever since that on this app along with all my friends who got it. I’m actually to the point where I’m very concerned about my school acc, sometimes it won’t even open docs and stuff. Please fix this or take all accounts off so it makes it easier for everyone else. Ugh.

I read a book using this app and that experience was fine. Nothing to write home about but it got the job done.

What really is annoying is how quickly I ACCIDENTALLY (and yet *permanently*) deleted the book I had JUST FINISHED. Gone forever and I’m going to have to rebuy it.

How did I manage to do this, you might ask?

I was poking around the app for features and saw that you can create “Shelves” – basically a way to categorize your collection. The … menu next to a book goes (in this order!):
- Remove Download
- Delete from your library
- Add to shelves

Yes, the options are next to each other. So you can imagine how easy it is to accidentally click on the delete option. And if you are already in a cadence of adding books to your shelves, how easily it is to tap delete, thinking you are confirming which shelf you’re adding the book to.

I looked up how I could get the book back and it turns out I’m going to have to REBUY IT. I had just finished it and annotated it and everything.

I have two unread purchases that I will read first, but I’m not going to use this app and really won’t recommend it to anyone either.

Google, I'm in your corner, here. Get some bugs squashed and my review will up to five stars. Highlighting and notes are now full of bugs.

There are several concepts in Play Books that outshine Kindle. The biggest being your integration with Docs for notes and highlights. This is gigantic if you're a researcher like myself. Kindle purposefully makes it a pain in the neck to access my own notes on a book. Play Books creates beautiful, editable documents that give me the freedom to use my notes easily; therefore, I will actually take my notes in the reader app. Fantastic!

That said, the app has been real buggy since the last update. You fixed the font resize issue. Thank you. However, this appears to have introduced a number of other bugs. Most of them dealing with highlighting and note taking. It crashes on me frequently when trying to take notes or reselect notes. Also, it refuses to let you delete a highlight, even when I can get the option to pop up. This is currently making the app almost unusable.

Really hope you all are addressing the bugs and creating a stable update, because I really don't want to return to Kindle.

Worked fine on my iPad 1 running iOS 5.x until the latest update. Now it crashes and quits when I try to log in on the new screen. Please fix!

Addendum three weeks later:
Do the developers read these reviews?! The lack of customer support here would be fitting for a one-person garage startup, not the mighty Google, which I just read is now the second-most valuable brand in the world! (Behind Apple but ahead of Coca-Cola.) PLEASE put out a bugfix update so those of us stuck with iOS 5 on our first-generation iPads can once again access our ebooks.

Second addendum late October:
Much better. After the last bugfix release, app FINALLY loads and runs on my iPad 1 with iOS 5.x. Appalling that it took so long for this serious problem to be fixed, though. App still buggy. Crashes frequently and sometimes displays only the top half of a page until hard reboot of iPad. Synchronization with iPhone works well.

Correction to second addendum:
Hard reboot did not fix problem after all of only top half of display area being used. What did work (as I discovered through trial and error) was to archive the affected book and then re-download it. Shouldn't have to jump through hoops like this!

Glitchy, can’t purchase on app. Have to go to website. After purchasing due to app errors, can’t load book. Customer service like app is a joke.

I’ve been reading a book since last night and it was fine until this afternoon when I open the book it says it’s open on too many devices and I’m allowed -1 devices for that book and I need to log out on another device. I am only logged in on this device and I can’t figure out how to fix this. It’s so frustrating.

This is one of those time you wish the justice department would enforce anti-trust laws. The first issue is, the book has no internal search feature. The second issue is that i kept getting an error that my book was open on another device - only i don’t have another device. It is conceivable that someone in the world hacked me and opened this very obscure book on Indian corporate governance - but unlikely. The worst part is the customer service. Or should i say the lack there of. And now the link doesn’t even work - at least they are honest. Let’s just hope their automated cars have better customer support.