Google Play Books

Google Docs and Play Books gain new features

Several of Google's applications in the App Store—including Docs, Slides, Sheets, Play Books and YouTube—have gained new features or bug fixes in a barrage of updates this morning. The company's productivity and Office replacement app, Docs, will now render your comments and suggestions in Print layout, show line spacing and strikethrough in Office's Compatibility mode and let you control paragraph directionality for right-to-left languages.

Google Play Books gains OCR-based search

The Google Play Books app has received a nice update this morning which lets you search through the contents of scanned pages.

If you've used the Google Books service before, you know that the Internet giant supports a variety of book formats, including those with free-flowing text, scanned pages or even a combination of both.

Unlike the regular text which can be copied and pasted, scanned pages are regular images. Therefore, to make searching of scanned pages possible some sort of an optical character recognition (OCR) feature needs to run either on the device itself or on the server.

That's exactly what this Google Play Books update does for you...

Google Play Books gets copy-paste and Single Sign-On support

With less than 48 hours until iOS 7 is let out of the cage, Apple's iOS developers have been tremendously busy updating their iPhone and iPad apps with iOS 7 compatibility. Needles to say, we're expecting a brand new and flattened version of the company's own iBooks app and its other downloadable iPhone and iPad programs, such as the free iLife/iWork suite. But those who get their electronic books from Google, however, should download the newly updated Play Books app.

Not only does it include handy support for copy and paste, there's the tremendously useful unified account sign-in feature which lets you skip typing altogether and instead log in with your Google Account real fast...