Google has added new features to its Play Books platform, ones aimed at young kids who may not yet know how to read or who may have limited reading skills. In addition to a new read-and-listen feature, the app also now offers a kid-friendly dictionary to help young readers learn new vocabulary while reading stories.
A new Star Wars biography-style book is coming with the name Skywalker: A Family At War. This book will be legit canon, official canonical material, meaning it only uses and expands upon Star Wars stories that are verifiably "true" in the current Star Wars universe. This book does not include any bit of data or story that Lucasfilm, Disney, or otherwise, would consider "Legends."
Online publishing platform Medium has acquired Glose, a Paris-based online ebook store that includes some robust social features. The company announced the business deal on Friday, stating that it will integrate Glose with its platform to bring more than 1.5 million ebooks -- and the related Glose features -- to its users.
Being confined indoors most of the time has resulted in a rise in the consumption of digital content but it isn't just videos and games that have suddenly become even more popular than ever before. Without easy access to libraries and bookstores, bookworms have taken to eBooks to get their fix. And because most people are on tight budgets, Kobo is launching a new no-frills eReader that knows a trick or two to help you read your favorite books wherever, whenever.
Scribd, the company best known as a platform for hosting documents, is also home to an ebook subscription service that provides access to a large library of fiction and non-fiction digital books. Though the service revolves around ebooks, Scribd has dabbled with other types of content in the past -- it offered digital comic books for a while, for example, before removing them. The latest arrival are digital magazines.
If you own an iPhone or iPad, you've likely had a notification appear on your home screen from Apple Books over the past couple of days. The company is giving users in the United States a free audiobook or ebook to help keep them entertained during the quarantine, though they can't pick whatever they want from the service's full catalog. The offer is available for a limited time.
It would appear that Star Wars lore just cannot stay solid as, just this week, Rey's parentage changed yet again. As events and details in the novelization of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker showed, the official word on the origin of Rey's parents is not exactly what you might've assumed, given the details present in the film. Further, it would seem that the actor who played Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) shed some light on an earlier version of the films' script, after the impenetrable wall of Lucasfilm NDA fell at the film's premiere. This is where I say SPOILER ALERT if you'd like to remain unspoiled.
For the first time, Pokemon graphic novels will be available through schools and public libraries around the world as ebooks. The content will be made available through the Rakuten OverDrive platform, the popular platform used by many facilities to provide free access to ebooks, audiobooks, and videos. The digital Pokemon content will be available through schools and libraries that support the service.
As George R.R. Martin said multiple times in the past, television and novels are two very different mediums. Game of Thrones the television series followed the books pretty spot-on to start - and stuck with a lot of the eventual deaths and lives of the characters in a very general way. Now that we've reached the end of the television series and have two more novels in the Game of Ice and Fire left, what's left to change? And what's changed already? Also note: This post is absolutely riddled with spoilers, so watch out!
Amazon has announced the launch of support for Traditional Chinese language books on Kindle. The collection includes more than 20,000 books in Traditional Chinese available across the Kindle platform, including on the Kindle mobile apps, Kindle Fire, and Kindle eReader devices. The selection includes translated bestsellers and works from popular authors like Liu Cixin and Qiong Yao.
Scribd, the document-hosting company that slowly transformed into an ebook destination, has launched its own original content. Simply called Scribd Originals, the new roster includes original content from a selection of authors, all of it available exclusively through Scribd. The launch is akin to Amazon's Audible Originals program, which offers original audiobook content exclusive to its platform.
Microsoft is shutting down its ebook store, a move that may frustrate a few users but probably leave many more people surprised that the books category existed in the first place. The software giant warned its ebook users today that, not only would the virtual store be closing, in a few months time they wouldn't be able to access any books they'd purchased.