Announced at the recent ‘Breakfast with Sundar’ event which saw the launch of the Nexus 7, Chromecast and Android 4.3, Google Play Textbooks was semi-overshadowed by some larger announcements but that’s not to say it’s not a valuable service and also potential money spinner for Google. The service has gone live overnight in Google Play Books in the US Play store.
According to Android Police, the service is now live offering both rentals and purchases. Apparently though, a large proportion are offering only one option or the other, with only a few offering the Buy or Rent option. If you want to run a proxy, you should be at least able to view the text books if you head over to Google Play, if not you will receive this unfortunate error.
Free samples are available for all the books and as with all the other Google Play Books you can read your purchases through the Google Play Books App available in Google Play as well as on any internet connected desktop computer through the “My Books” section of Google Play.
We’ve approached Google Australia with regards to an international rollout of Google Play Textbooks but have yet to hear back from them as yet. We’ll let update this post with any further information.
Would you rent or buy Textbooks from Google Play?
surely someone can make an ibooks author style app to use across all platforms, without taking a huge cut (or any cut ) of the sales of the created books. Add the copy protection like adobe (owners details on each page , non printable, etc). Then check the laws of format shifting text books etc, so say you take one printed copy of a text book , OCR scan so word search work. Then each student still buys a hard copy but then has a soft copy on tablet to carry to school rather a bag full of back breaking… Read more »