After reading Alexander Shcherbakov's article 'Google Play Books – a convenient and cheap service for reading classics', some points seemed to me rather controversial. Up to the point that I wanted to voice my point of view.
Let's start with the cost and availability of books. The modern printing industry is in a rather difficult situation. Technological advances make it fairly easy to copy books. And therefore, those willing to pay money for the purchase of books are becoming less and less. This trend is typical for both paper and electronic publications. Moreover, if paper is still able to offer at least some kind of alternative (those same notorious tactile sensations), then this is not the case with e-books. Therefore, more and more often the question is asked: 'Why should I pay for a book if I can get it for free?' However, this preamble is needed not to speculate about ethical aspects, but to come to an understanding of how publishers and stores get out of it. And they do it, focusing primarily on bestsellers. Yes, popular books are downloaded from pirated resources a lot. But they also buy a lot. Therefore, it is always possible to earn a pretty penny on them. However, this medal also has a downside: if you don't want the same thing as the masses, then you may simply not find the book you need.
The second aspect of how publishers and booksellers work in the digital world is that e-books are always cheaper than paper books (as long as they are in the mainstream, of course). This is what gives the chances of buying at least some number of copies.
If we are talking about classics, then we must certainly remember that for many works the copyright has expired. This means they can be distributed completely free of charge. Realizing this, the Liters store (perhaps the most popular in the Russian Internet) gives access to classical works for free. Do you love Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy? Please: you can download his works, ranging from short stories to 'War and Peace'.
Against this background, the offer of Google Play to buy 'War and Peace', even for a very small amount (about 113 rubles), is perhaps confusing.
Okay, Google Play may not be the best place to buy books. But maybe it provides an exclusive service for synchronizing reading a book between different devices? And again, no. We take the Moon + Reader Pro mentioned in Alexander's article (which, by the way, was once sold at a sale for 10 rubles) and open its settings in the reading mode of any book:
In other settings, select 'Synchronize last position via Dropbox' (or Google Drive if it's closer to you).
After that, when reading a book, Moon + Reader Pro will write the current position of the book to Dropbox. And when you try to open the book on another device (having previously also allowed synchronization there), you will see a message:
If you need to download all the books from the cloud, you can store them in the same service (Dropbox or Google Drive). The reader can open them directly from there.
So is Google Play Books needed in the end? If you like him, then why not. In the end, there you can also find publications that are not in liters. But talking about it as a convenient and cheap way to read classics is not entirely correct.