This wikiHow teaches you how to download eBooks from your Google Play Books library. You can use the Google Play Books website to do this on a desktop computer, or you can use the Google Play Books app on an iPhone or an Android to ensure that you'll be able to read the book even when you don't have Internet or cellular data access.

Google

A wealth of classic literature lives on the internet—in Google Books—and it's free to anyone who can find it. The Google database contains a massive library of scanned books from the collections of public and academic libraries. Google Book Search is a useful tool for finding these books according to a keyword or phrase search. Google searches the content of the books as well as titles and other metadata, so you can search for snippets, passages, and quotes. Sometimes, you can find whole books that you can add to your own library and read on your phone or tablet.

Only books with specific permissions can be downloaded for free, which usually means the books are old enough that they belong in the public domain. Some modern books are offered as an introduction to a series, too. Books with intact copyrights are available only for preview or, in some cases, for purchase in the Google Play Store. The amount of a book you can preview varies from just a citation to the entire book, depending on the agreement Google has with the publisher.

Jun 5, 2014 - By using the Google Play Books app you can read books (free and paid). Check that box to download that particular ebook for offline reading. Along with Amazon's Kindle platform, Google Play Books is one of the few ebook platforms which will let you upload your own ebooks to its servers and then download them and read them in an app. I was recently asked for help on how to upload the files, so I thought it would be useful to document the.

You can go directly to Google Books and find books to download for free. You'll need an author, genre, title, or some other descriptive term to enter into the search engine. The process is intuitive:

  1. Go to Google Books (not Google Play).

  2. Search for a descriptive term, such as 'Chaucer' or 'Wuthering Heights.'

  3. After Google returns the search results, click on Tools in the menu above the search results.

  4. You should see the ​Tools menu appear at the top of the search results. Click on the option that says Any Books.

  5. Change it to Free Google eBooks in the drop-down menu to narrow the search results.

  6. When you find a book you want to download, click it to open its page, and choose Add to my library at the top of the screen. If you prefer to download the book as a PDF, go to the Settings cog icon and select Download PDF.

Download Ebook From Google Play

Some of the books in the search results aren't going to be classic or even public domain books; some are just books someone wrote and wants to distribute for free on Google Books, whether forever or for only a few hours. Read the description that appears with each of the books in the search results list for more details. You can adjust the Any time option in the ​Tools menu to find only older works to exclude modern commentaries.

If you're not interested in reading a full book and just want to find out some information, you can use the Tools menu to restrict your search to books with an available preview by selecting Preview available in the Any time drop-down menu. That filter also shows free ebooks because they always include full previews.

Download Ebook From Google Play App

In the Google Play Books Android application, there is an option to keep an ebook on a device if the user wants to do it. So when you decide to do such a thing, the ebook may be stored somewhere on the Android device. I would like to know where the ebook is stored. I searched in /mnt/storage and I only found Aldiko ebooks (in the /mnt/storage/eBooks folder), not the Google Play eBooks.

Thanks for your answsers.

PS : if it can help, I do this on an Archos G9 101 tablet.

air-dexair-dex

3 Answers

I checked several sources on this. Googles own help page states:

The Google Play Books app automatically stores books in the location with the most free space, whether that's your device or your SD card, as of when the app was first launched. If you've upgraded your app, your books will continue to be stored in the same location they were before the upgrade.

Which is not very precise. A discussion on the Archos forum reveals a setting available in the app (Settings> Storage location), but there you can only chose between internal and external storage. But the same thread as well as another one on XDA reveal the path as being /data/data/com.google.android.apps.books/ (which is the apps data directory on internal storage), the Archos forums thread also mentioning Android/data/com.google.android.apps.books/files/volumes/, which could apply to the 'external storage'.

As I don't use Google Books, maybe you could check those locations and confirm.

Note that accessing /data/data/* requires 'root powers'. Without that, you probably won't see anything in that place.

IzzyIzzy

How To Download Ebook From Google Play

If you want to add books you downloaded on your computer, the books are stored in: /data/data/com.google.android.apps.books/files/accounts/{your google account}/volumes, and when you are inside the 'volumes' folder you will see some folders with a name that is some code for that book. Once you click one of those folders you will see 2 .png files: those are the cover of the book.

Download Ebook From Google Play

Google play free books download
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You can select 'enable PDF uploading'. This will allow you select all your books and upload to your Google account. That way, you can read from any device by just signing in. And you can select to view offline.

This reduces the amount of data needed on your device.

AlvynFashAlvynFash

protected by CommunityOct 12 '15 at 19:42

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