Google Play Books

Grand Theft Auto-loving iPhone owners can get an early taste of San Andreas thanks to a new companion app, while Twitter is said to be redesigning its own first-party title, and Google is improving functionality in Google Play Books for iOS.

Google on Thursday updated its iBooks-like Google Play Books port, bringing in-app rentals, highlighting and note taking for scanned books, as well as other features to the iOS title.

Google Play Books is now available in nine new countries, giving more iOS and Android users access to the firm’s extensive ebook library — five million titles at last count — and digital reading service....

Just when you thought Google couldn’t possibly have any more news to announce after its I/O keynote, the company has yet another update to share: Google Play Books has received a redesign on both iOS and Android, and now allows you to upload your own PDF or EPUB files for reading....

Google has updated its Play Books e-reader apps for iOS and Android to include support for EPUB and PDF files from outside the Play Store. The new feature has been enabled as part of Google's strategy to unite its cloud services, allowing users to either upload their ebooks via its website, or import them from their Google Drive storage. Google says that users will be able to store up to 1,000 files for free, as long as they are under 50MB....

Google has released an update for its iOS Play Books app, bringing a number of new features to the iBooks rival. The key update here is annotation and bookmarking: users can now bookmark pages simply by tapping the top-right corner of the screen, as well as highlight, annotate, and translate text they've selected. You can now also check the definition of a word as you read, or look up difficult terms with Wikipedia or Google. It's also notable that most of these features aren't available on the Android...