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Google to Revamp, Relaunch Digital Textbooks Section in Google Play Books, Will Also Rent Them

8049772722_62ef5e0d20[1]Remember earlier this month when I revealed that Google was considering ebook rentals and all of a sudden preferred to accept Epub3? I just found out why Google made those changes.

Google has just announced (via the livestreaming event going on right now) that they plan to roll out a new textbook section in Google Play Books. The content is going to be available next month (in time for the new school year here in the US).

There aren’t any specific details on which titles will be available, but Google did say that they had teamed up with 5 major textbook publishers to offer a “comprehensive selection of titles”. The ebooks will be available for sale and rent, and the rental option is supposed to allow readers to pay only a fraction of the full cost of an ebook to rent for a period of up to six months.

google play books textbooks

The new ebooks are going to be available in the Google Play Books apps for Android, iPad, and iPhone as well as on the web. They’ll support the same reading features as the current Google Play Books service, including search, bookmarks, highlighting, notes, and a “night mode”.

So Google is getting into textbooks, and now that they accept Epub3 they are probably going for the fancy-shmancy textbooks as well.

This is an interesting change, but not for the reason you think.

You see, Google Play already has a textbook section; they just don’t have very many textbooks in it.

google play books textbooksWhile there are some reference books and actual textbooks from publishers like O’Reilly, many of the titles in that section aren’t actually textbooks. Instead they are general nonfiction titles like for Dummies books, or classics that your English teacher might assign, or basic how to books.

Today’s news could be a sign that Google plans to offer better support for textbook buying, but I could be reading too much into it. All we can really say is that Google is more interested in content then they were last month, and more interested in enhanced ebooks than last month.

That’s interesting news, or at least it was when I reported it 3 weeks ago.

Update: A trip to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine showed me that the textbook section was not listed in Google Play in July 2012 (that’s the last time that Google Play Books was indexed). Instead many of the categories that now make up the textbook section were listed separately in Google Play Books. A lot of the ebooks currently listed in the textbook section were already in Google Play Books in those sections.

image by hackNY

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