If you love to read, even if only occasionally, there is nothing more useful than having a book app on your mobile device allowing you to take potentially thousands and thousands of book with you anywhere you go, all able to fit in your pocket. There are numerous book applications out there, but there are two behemoths that are arguably the two best, with large libraries of available content and loads of cool features. Google Play Books and the Amazon Kindle app are the focus of today’s battle. Which one is better suited to your tastes? Does one have better features than the other or specific content you enjoy that isn’t included in the other? We’ll go over a few features of each application then let you decide which app should be the winner.
Google Play Books
Google Play Books is google’s own ebook app, featuring tons of different books in the library for you to read. Since this a Google based app, you can take your books with you anywhere and access them on just about any device as long as you have a browser, and the Play Books app is even available on iOS. Play Books now lets you even load in your own book content, allowing uploads to your library of ebooks in PDF format, or EPUB format, or you can purchase books right from the Play Store or the Google Play web interface.
The interface has been updated with the latest material design style UI so it’s visually pleasing as well as functional. You can add bookmarks to a page or highlight specific paragraphs or sentences or really any amount of text so you can go back to where you left off at any point, and you can choose between three different reading modes to suit the time of day, which include day, night, and sepia modes. You can further customize the reading experience by changing the font and the font sizes, and if you don’t care to read but you still want to consume the content of the book, you can turn on the text-to-speech option if the book supports it.
Amazon Kindle
The Amazon Kindle app is not so different from Google Play Books. It gives readers access to millions of digital books in the palm of their hands, and it even syncs with your Kindle account so you can keep on reading no matter what device you have available to you at the time as it’s available on multiple different platforms. One unique feature of Kindle is that you can check out ebooks from your local library and upload them into your Kindle app, which is pretty cool if you don’t want to buy and keep the books you’re interested in reading.
You can also shop for and purchase books from right within the Kindle app, and it has a built-in dictionary allowing you to look up specific words at any point if you’re not sure what they mean. Kindle also has a collection of free ebooks available and you can sample most books before you buy them so you know before you drop the cash if you’ll continue reading it or not, which is also a feature of Google Play Books. You can also customize the reading experience with options for changing out the font and font size, background color and screen brightness to tailor the reading experience to specific times of day or just your personal tastes.
There you have it, two wonderful ebook apps with plenty to offer anyone who enjoys a good book. Which is the better app for you though? Are you already somewhat invested in one particular platform and have chosen to stick with what you know, or did you have the freedom to choose which you one you preferred the most and go from there?