Google today announced that its Play store now features digital textbooks
from well-known publishers like Pearson, Wiley, Macmillian Higher
Education, Random House, McGraw-Hill and Cengage Learning. The
announcement doesn’t come as a surprise, given that Google had announced this feature during its Nexus 7 and Chromecast launch event a few weeks ago, but at the time, it didn’t specify an exact launch date.
There are no real surprises here. Just like with any other book you
buy on Google Play, your purchase will be stored in the cloud and you
can read your books on an Android tablet, phone, iOS device and on the
web. Google says its textbooks will rent for six months for about 80
percent off the regular purchase price. While many books on the platform
are also available for purchase, quite a few are only available for rent. Checkout, of course, is handled by Google Wallet.
It’s worth noting that this is not as ambitious as Apple’s initiative
to bring more interactive digital textbooks to tablets with the help
of, for example, its iBooks Author
tool. Google Play’s textbooks are for the most part static copies of
the original texts and images without any additional gimmicks. Some
books only feature scanned pages that accurately represent the printed version of the book, while others also offer free-flowing text and, thanks to this, also allow you to change line height, text size, justification and typeface.
Just like on other textbook platforms, you “search within a textbook
for a particular word or phrase, bookmark chapters and pages, highlight
and annotate key passages and get quick access to dictionaries,
translation tools, Wikipedia and Google search.”
