San Francisco – Not satisfied at stopping with its recent European tour, Google Play Books has just buttoned several new features to its Android ebooks app, including highlighting and annotation, translation, dictionary definitions and geographic information to make reading Google Play Books on Android a more informative experience.
The freshly revealed features are not mind-bending, but may just be a starting point for how Google plans to incorporate various web functions into ebooks. Besides providing support for reading Japanese books in a vertical, right-to left layout, Google Play Books now offers several new features, including the ability to explore places and definitions mentioned in text.
Image Credit: (Paidcontent.org)
A newly bundled translation feature takes user-highlighted words and phrases and delivers them out in the reader’s language of choice. Another highlight feature is the ability to select passages and add notes with personal thoughts, questions, or context. The highlights and notes are then saved online and synchronized to the reader’s Google Play account, making them available on a phone, tablet, or web browser.
Here are the essential changes, limited to the Android version of the app for now:
- Highlighting and Notes: Users can now highlight text and take notes. As with Kindle highlights and annotations, Google ebook highlights and notes are stored in the cloud and sync across devices.
- Dictionary Definitions and Geographic Info: Tap on a place to pull up a Google map and more info from Google and Wikipedia, or tap on a word to get its definition.
- Translation: Translate words and phrases (but not entire books). Kindle Touch also has this feature.
- Ability to read Japanese books from right to left.
On the other hand, with maps being an unbelievably hot topic in tech these days, perhaps its no wonder that they are coming to more remote corners of Google services. An update unfurled today brings location awareness to e-books.
Among other things, Google Maps is the most prominent new feature in an Google Play Books, and Mountain view now empower users to tap on names of geographical spots within text and see them pinned to a Google Map alongside the option to find more information using search engine Google or Wikipedia to learn more about the location.
“Starting today, when you come across an unfamiliar geographic location — a faraway city or distant mountain range — you can tap on the location to learn more about it,” the company said in a blog post. “You will see an info card with a Google Map and the option to get more information by searching on Google or Wikipedia.”
In addition, this latest version of Google Play is a noticeable improvement to the app that takes advantage of Google’s other mobile and web services. Another interesting thing to note is that these updates help bring Google Play Books to parity with rival apps from Apple, Amazon and others. The app is available now to users in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, United States, and United Kingdom.
Google Play Books will now include information from Google Maps. (Credit: Google)
Google Play Books is a free download.