Good news for book-lovers is here! Audiobooks are now available on GooglePlay and they can be downloaded and played on the company’s biggest hit right now – the Google Home speakers. You won’t have to engage with no paper pages, just download any book you find interesting and sit back, relax and listen carefully. The Google Assistant will do all of that for you and the fact that they are compatible with it, means that they can be played on any Android device.
Google’s taking a lesson from Apple’s iBook model, that allows its customers to purchase audiobooks without any need of a subscription. Book-worms can do that with Audible books as well, but the bad thing about it is that Amazon, which is the owner of Audible, is constantly pressuring its customers to sign for a full subscription, which is not the greatest choice in my opinion.
I don’t know how good all those things are because the whole idea of reading is getting misunderstood. We, as people, are used to processing information better with reading, so the classic way of “consuming” that information, to me, will always remain a freshly printed or a twenty-year-old book that smells like nostalgia.
However, that’s just my opinion. Those who love audio-books will have great benefit from this project by Google and will be able to listen to books at up to 2x speed and set a sleep timer for falling asleep at night, which will be great for reading out loud kid stories. It is able to sync your place across multiple devices. What it can’t do, unfortunately, is sync your place between an ebook and the audiobook, as they’re completely separate offerings across the web.
For now, it will only work with the Google Assistant on Android phones, not iPhones and only in English, since the project is at its very beginning. And though it’s “coming soon to the Assistant on Android Auto in the US,” it won’t be there at the initial launch. The Google Play Books app will work with the normal touch interface, however, and will also support machine learning. What the company admits, props for that is that initially, the users may experience some trouble with the whole software. By trouble, I mean that chapter markers may be sometimes messy and that will be caused by the automatic timestamps that the software creates itself. It analyzes the pauses after each chapter and sets them as “checkpoints” or chapter beginnings.
With that new idea, Google is now fully ready to compete with its rivals from Amazon and Apple and does not back up to any option that they offer. For now, they admit that there will be some trouble, but I firmly believe that they will easily fix all those things as soon as possible. Most importantly, it is already available, so you can try it out and check whether it is for you, or it is not.
