Hey everybody and welcome to another edition of Googling Friday. This week I want to talk about Google’s new eBook reader but as always, we have Google news for the week.
Groupon says no to Google
There has been speculation last week and indeed Google made an offer to buy Groupon the daily-deal site. However Groupon declined the offer. I’m guessing they were looking for a higher dollar amount than the $6 billion that Google offered or maybe they see a niche and want to explore it, remember a few years ago Mark Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo’s offer to buy Facebook and I think that turned out well for Facebook.
Google updates Priority Inbox
Earlier this week, Google announced it has updated the algorithm used to determine what is a priority message in your Inbox in Gmail. It will also offer insight in a message as to why it is considered priority. You can find this message by hovering over the yellow arrow above the message. Hopefully this will make Priority Inbox even more accurate.
Google Books
On Monday, Google unveiled its eBook store and ebook reader applications for iOS and Android devices. Upon initial review of both the application and the store it is Ok but missing some key features that people maybe used to in the Amazon Kindle Store. For example, there doesn’t seem to be a way to highlight or make notes on certain lines in the book. From a store perspective, it has a general search box but not a search by option, so if you say search works by Earnest Hemingway, it will display both his books and books about him. These are minor fixes via software update, but it is also missing a key thing, Kindle support. It does support Sony and Nook, but not Kindle as of now. Obviously it is a 1.0 product right now so it will be interesting to see how it evolves. For now, here are some screenshots.
The shot on the far left is the boot up screen on the iPhone, the middle is what your bookshelf looks like, and the third is the online store. Also, Google has a video explaining their eBook reader application and store and its advantages.
Well, that is going to do it for this edition of Googling Friday. Stop by next week for another helping of all things Google! Have a great weekend!
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