Google Play Books may soon get an ”Ask Gemini” button, but the bigger problem is that the app still feels unfinished. The new AI hook could help readers with character names, summaries, and quick explanations, yet it also risks serving up spoilers while Google leaves long-standing basics like file handling, format support, and customization on the back burner.
That priority shift is a familiar Google move: add a flashy layer on top of a product before fixing the plumbing underneath. In the e-book world, that is especially awkward because competitors have spent years turning simple reading apps into surprisingly capable libraries, document viewers, and formatting tools.
What Gemini could do inside Google Play Books
Google Play Books was recently spotted with code references to Gemini in an APK teardown, including an ”Ask Gemini” option in the text-selection menu. On paper, that sounds useful enough: a reader could highlight a confusing passage and get a faster answer than switching apps to search the web.
There is a catch, though. A tool that summarizes characters or plot points can just as easily overexplain them. That is a real problem for fiction, where even a well-intentioned recap can flatten the story before the reader gets there. AI can help, but it also needs guardrails strong enough to avoid becoming a spoiler machine.
Where Google Play Books still feels behind
For a reading app that has been around this long, Play Books is still missing features that many users would consider table stakes. It handles ePUB and PDF files, but the experience of adding your own books is clunky, and uploads can occasionally vanish until the app is reset. That is not exactly the kind of polish that makes you trust it with a personal library.
- No device-wide search for new files, so uploads are manual, one by one
- Limited format support, with no DOCX, MOBI, or TXT
- Very basic reading controls compared with apps like Moon+ Reader and ReadEra
- A home screen that prioritizes recommendations over your own library
That gap matters because the competition is not standing still. Apps such as Moon+ Reader and ReadEra have made a business out of giving readers more control, whether that means better library organization, more file compatibility, or deeper text settings. Google does not need to copy them feature for feature, but it does need to stop acting like brightness and font size are enough.
The missing reading controls
The most frustrating part is that the weaknesses are all obvious ones. Play Books does not offer the kind of text customization that serious readers expect, such as line width, margins, background color, or font color. It is a strange omission in an app built around spending hours staring at words.
Even the book display feels half-baked. A virtual bookshelf sounds old-fashioned until you compare it with a grid of suggestions that keeps nudging you toward Google’s storefront logic instead of your own library. That tension has always been the app’s identity problem: it is a bookstore, a reader, and a recommendation engine, but not quite enough of any one of them.
Google’s AI habit may be the wrong fix
There are legitimate uses for Gemini in Play Books. Personalized recommendations, narration help, and character summaries all make sense in theory. The problem is sequence: if the app still makes it annoying to import files, hard to organize a library, and underpowered for reading plain text, AI feels like a layer of polish on a cracked floor.
So the real question is not whether Gemini belongs in Play Books. It is whether Google can resist turning another product into a showcase for AI before it has earned the basics. If not, some readers will do the simplest thing possible: move their books somewhere else and stop waiting for Google to catch up.