The Google Play Books Android app has decided to be a little more obliging when it comes to helping users explore and understand the content they’re reading. Apart from this, certain tweaks and interface enhancements will pop up here and there.
For one, users will actually be able to peruse Japanese books in a vertical, right-to-left layout and turn pages from right to left. The day and night themes that are offered presently, have been joined by a new-fangled sepia reading theme. Certain stability issues have been dealt with in this update to the app and there’s 2D sliding page turn animation to look forward to.
Readers who’ve bumped into an unfamiliar place, say a mountain range or a strange city, and wanted to know more about it may have resorted to exiting the application to look up the location or hunted it down later or simply put it out of their head. From now onwards, tapping on a place can throw up an info card with a Google Map and the choice to learn about it through Search or Wikipedia.
A quick tap will also work its magic for rendering definitions to unfamiliar words. Translation has been dragged right into the picture, with a button in the top action bar being all users need to call upon in order to translate words or phrases between languages. Lastly, text can be highlighted or annotations made and these changes will be synced across the concerned phone, tablet and web.
The updated Google Play Books Android app is available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Spain and the US.
