Google Books app feels rushed, disappoints

Margins.

The iPhone Kindle app is pleasant to read because it has margins; the Google book app is just grating on the eyes: it fills the entire screen with text. Ugh.

I have the same experience. I was really excited only to be disappointed.

"A two-page side-by-side layout seems to be a given in the e-reader world. I'm stunned it's not already in there."

iBooks on my iPad doesn't do this either when reading PDFs, which is the format most of my books and magazines are in.

So far my experience with Google Books has been pretty positive. I didn't encounter any of the loading problems described in this review. In fact, the review seems to be nitpicking to the point of shameless fanboyism.

BTW Erica + Editors:

Scanned pages are there. In the Settings, scroll down a bit more to see the option. It is under the Day/Night mode.

Of course, the fact that there seems to be no built in dictionary or a way to do annotations is in my mind a much bigger problem and makes me wonder about the positive reviews I have seen elsewhere about Google eBooks...and the people that have reviewed it as anything but 'half-baked'.

I guess if you live and love Google and abhor quality...

All Google apps feel rushed and initially disappoint. They need to hire less engineers and get some quality UI people in there and then get out of their way. Google is a company ran by engineers that don't appreciates aesthetics or UI--it is a fundamental weakness of the company.

In your rush to review, its a shame you didn't let the book finish loading before you flipped through it. I don't see very many loading screens at all. And instead of reviewing the original pages feature you say you couldn't find a book with it, despite the sample books having it.

Typical biased reviewing.

There isn't a single book reader app for iOS at the moment that is perfect. iBooks is missing the wealth of content that Amazon and Google offer, is missing Google's night mode, doesn't allow you to offload books to the cloud like Amazon and Google do, and is really weak in its synching capabilities compared to the others.

Kindle doesn't offer PDF support like iBooks and, at least to me, the reading experience isn't quite as slick.

Google also doesn't offer PDF support or landscape mode, and is obviously the least polished of the three in general.

None of the top three offer folders/multiple bookcases for grouping, nor is it easy to navigate through a book visually using thumbnails. (BookReader offers both these features for PDF files, although it has its own issues.)

For now I'm happiest with iBooks, but only because my book library is mostly filled with technical books that I've purchased in ePub or PDF form from the publishers. If Apple just added night mode and the ability to group books into multiple bookcases (just like app folders) then it would be close enough to perfect for me.

I like the combination of four fonts in the app header...

TUAW Google Books app review feels rushed, disappoints

The reviewer should have just said, "wah wah, I want my twinkie back!" Sorry the app doesn't support your "nervous tick" or your reading habit of playing solitaire. Lame review, imho.