Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocketnow.com the wars for e-reading has just picked up with the release of the Google eBookstore and the Google Books application for Android and for iOS devices in this video we're going to compare the Google Books application for Android with the Kindle application for Android and talk a little bit about this new entrant into the e-book reader space let's get to it so right now a lot of choices if you want to download or buy a book and read it on multiple devices you have the Barnes & Noble Nook store you can get an application for your smartphone you can buy a nook at the Barnes & Noble store or online among other things the Kindle application store takes that to the next level you can read it in web browsers you can read it on Mac of PC you can read it on pretty much any smartphone that is out there and and Google's aiming to take a similar approach although they're opening it a little bit more so not only can you read books that you buy through Google Books in your web browser on your Android phone or your iPhone but you can also read your google books on the Sony e-reader and the Barnes and Noble Nook because of the format's that they can support however you cannot read Google ebooks on the Amazon Kindle but although as mentioned the Amazon Kindle has pretty much all of their bases covered if you buy a book you can read it on really any device so let's talk about the books interface and we're looking at this on the Samsung Galaxy Tab right now but of course it'll look about the same on any Android phone it's a free application it's very simple and here we have our library and we can go into landscape from here a nice simple and clean interface shows you the front covers of the books it is preloaded with some titles like Alice in Wonderland so let's go into that and we'll see what it looks like to read a book now right now we have it set to night theme and there's a lot of viewing options here if we go to settings we can turn on the day theme make the text bigger change the font depending on what you like change the text justification if we go back it'll change it and just like the Kindle application just like the Nook application you flick to turn pages it's a very we can go into landscape and we'll get a should get a wider view perhaps we're locked into a portrait view it's just a very similar reading experience and of course from the application you can buy books but it's going to push you onto the web so if we click get ebooks it's going to bring you to the Google Books books website which ties in nicely to your Google account so we can scroll down here and see all of these books you can see the prices there and it will work through Google Checkout and of course these prices are pretty much the same that you're gonna find in Barnes & Noble e-reader store and the Kindle Store let's say we want to get a sample of this book we click get sample and boom it says the sample is now in your library read now it jumps you right back into the Google Books application and boom you are on page one within seconds reading the sample very nice let's go back because there are some settings in this library if we go to the menu button and click on manage ebooks this will show you all of the ebooks associated with your Google account you can Trash them from the cloud or you can actually buy them within this screen so very quickly you can say oh I've been reading these three books two of them I want to buy and actually read instead of just look through the sample let's go back and see the other settings we can choose so here's the the books the diversion location where to store your books you can actually store it on the SD card of your phone and just like the Amazon Kindle application you can have books that are stored in the cloud or archived as they're called in the Kindle application and then books that are stored on your device for easy reading that is why if we go back to this screen manage ebooks if I were to pin now I can read the book while I'm offline so it's actually going to download it directly to my device within seconds so a very robust reading experience it's actually extremely similar to what you get on Kindle so here in Kindle if I go to archived items this will show me all of the books that I've read that are hanging out in the cloud and any of these books I can tap and they will download to my library and it says download selected items it will sync the page and I last read just like good the Google bookstore was so very similar experiences now what happens if we want to buy a book here now that gets a little bit different so if we go down to the menu button we go to Kindle Store it's gonna drop us into the Kindle interface which doesn't always keeps us logged in it's a shame that there's no built-in bookstore within the application so of course from here we can go to New York Times bestsellers we can click on a book and again these are about the same prices that you'll see and we can try a sample and that's gonna ask you to login but it's really only one time so in terms of which of these applications is better the books application or the Kindle application I'd say the books application has better integration with the cloud which is better that said if you have been using the Kindle ecosystem all along you probably don't want to start on something new if you've been in the no Kiko system you probably don't want to start on something new but if you haven't yet gotten into e-reading yet and you plan to buy books and you want to read them on your smartphone and your tablet and everything Google ebooks may be the best way to go because it's we're going to work with the most amount of devices and the prices are are very similar to what you get with you within the Kindle and the Nook store so the Google Books application is quite good you should try it out especially if you haven't yet made a decision on which bookstore you want to be a part of if you want to read books digitally if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up and thanks for watching that's it for now