Today, Google Play Books is launching Beta Features, which gives our users early access to experimental features. These features are opt-in only on the web and may lack a bit of polish, but could evolve, improve, disappear or transform into new Play Books product updates. While they’re experimental, they’re designed to test and improve the user experience.
Head to play.google.com/books, click the Settings button, and select “Beta Features” to get started. You can enable all features or just the ones you find most useful. If you’d like to submit feedback on the Beta Features after you’ve tried them out, or want to send Google a feature request you’ve been dreaming up, click on the Settings icon and then select Send Feedback.
The first features to launch are customized bookshelves, which allows you to organize them anyway you see fit. Searching and Sorting is also available, it allows you to quickly search for a particular book or sort your library using different criteria. The last beta feature is Ready to Read, which is a new shelf that shows you the books you haven’t finished yet to help you quickly pick up where you left off.
Right now the beta features are for your desktop browser to start and then will make their way over to Android and iOS.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
