We recently saw the announcement of Google Books in the U.K. and it was noted that Australia would receive it shortly. It looks like we didn’t have to wait too long in the end.
Google Australia has now put up an official blog post announcing the launch of their new book store called Google eBooks.
Excerpt from Official Google Australia Blog
We’ve got hundreds of thousands of titles to choose from, including plenty of bestsellers, and millions of free eBooks on top of that. It’s easy to find great Australian authors like Kate Grenville, Thomas Keneally, Geraldine Brooks and Christos Tsiolkas.
How to get Google eBooks on your Android Device…
- Go to your Android phone and download Google Books from the Market
- Accept Terms & Conditions
- Go back into the Market app (You may just sit on a black screen, don’t panic)
- Search for a book title
- You will now see search results categorised by Apps or Books
- Select the book you were after or navigate back to the Books landing page
- Now you’re rocking Google Books
Google eBooks allows you to purchase and read from a large collection of digitally published books. The benefit of using Google’s eBook store is the ability to have the books available on your PC, Apple device, Android phone or Android tablet and have it sync up to the cloud with the page you are currently reading. This allows you to read your book while on the train and then to continue reading it at home on a laptop or tablet without losing your page.
Google also has an extensive collection of free and paid books from classics like Alice in Wonderland (Free) to the more recent Steve Jobs biography (AU$9.99).
So do yourself a favour and start downloading some free books or purchase some great titles and build up your digital book collection that will be available at your fingertips anywhere, anytime.
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it is telling me that googlebooks cant be opened on android in australia, any ideas??
I hope Google Movies will be next!
i think i’ll stick to the kindle app (also avail for pc, mac, iphone, and not to mention the kindle itself)
prices are better on most books I’ve checked and it has the same synchronisation feature and from what i understand, a greater collection of books available
The steve jobs book is $17.99 here in Canada (not 9.99) and they won’t accept my aussie credit card. *Sigh*
There’s two different Job’s books btw. One is the offical biography and the other one costs $17.60 here
Just checked it out. Great to see Australian publishers charging hardcover prices ($35 and up for a lot of books). It was never parallel imports that were going to kill Aus literature, its the ridiculous premiums being charged by publishers.
Prices are double those on amazon so it can’t just be the publishers. Unless the publishers are giving amazon has more leverage against publishers and getting better prices because of it.
Yeah any excitement I did have had been extinguished. I don’t think they (the industry..) understand – people are quite prepared to download music when an MP3 is 5 – 10 MB.. a BlueRay rip which is 5 – 10 GB. They’ll have no qualms downloading entire publisher catalogues given that eBooks are < 1 MB. Get with the times!
Matt, it’s not the size of the file being downloaded that’s at issue here. It’s the price being artificially held high, due to the parallel imports restrictions laws on physical publications (despite the vast majority of books here being printed and bound overseas, and published and distributed within Australia by overseas owned and operated mobs), and that this trade restriction pricing policy is being applied to eBooks as well. All that this pricing insanity will achieve will be to drive users away from Google Books to Amazon, or to piracy.
I’m quite aware what the issues are. My point (maybe I was being a bit obtuse) was that people will just pirate if they aren’t given fair alternatives.. except unlike music and video, entire publisher catalogues will fit on a DVD. That is to say it’s even easier than pirating music and video so they need to set their expectations on price and lending a lot lower.
Am i the only person who’s getting device incompatible on the S2 with this? Im rocking the latest stock leaked samsung rom: KJ1
Just installed on the wife`s SGSII, no issues, but hers is completely stock Optus phone.
Maybe it’s telstra?? I wish the description of why i can’t install it was more helpful…
Finally got google books working on my phone.. Had to uninstall the updated market i installed on my phone manually 😛
I have KJ1 on my S2 and its fine for me? I heard ppl had issues with certain books.