Google Play Books: First impressions

nd iOS and also on your laptops or desktops. For this purpose, Google has released dedicated apps on both the Play Store and the iTunes App Store. We tried out the app on an iPhone 4S, a Nexus 4 and a Micromax Canvas HD and realized that the app gave the best experience on the Nexus. On the Canvas HD's 5-inch display, we noticed that at times the app would force an incorrect page break, that would make text run over to the next page even when it shouldn't.

Google Play Books on Android and iOS

Google Play Books on PC

On the iPhone 4S, the app works well and formatting isn't an issue but there are a couple of disadvantages. The first and more serious one is that, as mandated by Apple, you can't buy books directly from the app. In fact, due to Apple's (dumb as hell) policy, Google hasn't added even a link to its Play Store website. As a result, if you want to buy a book, you'll need to open the browser and manually go to the Play Store website. The second disadvantage is a little subjective as we felt that the iPhone 4S' 3.5-inch display was a little too small for comfortable reading.

Buying a book from the Play Store makes that book available to you across all your devices where you have logged in using your Google account. What's even neater is that Play Books remembers the page you were on in a book when you stopped reading, and lets you read from that page even if you're doing so on a different device.

Although it was only launched yesterday, there's already plenty to like about Google Play Books. If you own an Android device, you owe it to yourself to use this service. It will be interesting to see how Google improves the store over the course of the year while competing with other services like Amazon's Kindle and Flipkart's Flyte.