Google’s answer to Amazon’s Kindle app has finally landed on Android phones in the UK today, after months of exclusivity across the pond.
Google Books will be familiar to anyone with experience of Amazon’s own application; a platform for reading and a digital shopfront rolled into one.
On opening the app for the first time you’ll need to link to your Gmail account, and from there you’re free to search for specific titles to download or browse through the most popular titles by category. As with Kindle, out of copyright classics are free, making this a no-brainer download for literature lovers.
“Readers in the UK now have access to the world’s largest e-books collection, with hundreds of thousands of e-books for sale — from major UK publishers like Hachette, Random House and Penguin — as well as more than two million public domain e-books for free.” Said Google, in a statement.
We had a brief play with the app this morning, indulging in a spot of Alice in Wonderland and Frankenstein in the name of research. The app runs as smoothly as we could hope it to, but our question is, as with the Google+ vs. Facebook saga, why should we be expected to switch to Google’s service when Amazon’s original Kindle app is serving us so well?
Google Books is now available free on the Android Market.
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