Google Play Books on Android now lets you manage multiple books at once, adds unshelved view

After receiving a brand new Material You logo this week and tools to help young readers practice comprehension, Google Play Books is already adding new features. I’m not sure why all of the sudden love for one of my favorite apps, especially as it hardly ever receives updates, but I’m not complaining.

Upon opening the app today, I was met with the following message – “You can now manage multiple books at once. Tap and hold to start”. As you’d expect, it means exactly what it says. Pressing and holding on any one book in your library brings up the familiar circle icon at the top of each book, allowing you to add them to a multi-select bundle.

After you select the first book, a slide menu appears at the bottom of your display, and you can perform several actions from it. If you have one book selected, you can share, rate the title, read more about the book by visiting its listing, and so on.

Whether you have one or multiple books selected, you can download them for offline viewing or listening (assuming it’s an audiobook), add them to a shelf, mark them as finished or read, add them to your Family Library, or permanently delete them.

Previously, you could only manage one book at a time on mobile, and you’d have to visit the less than impressive desktop interface to perform bulk edits and changes to your Play Boks library. I also noticed recently that a new grid size option has appeared on the smart chips above your library. It lets you switch from list view to a small grid or a large grid.

Of course, you can now also filter out books with ‘Read aloud’ and ‘Reading tools’. Lastly, if you visit your ‘Shelves’ tab, you’ll now see an ‘Unshelved’ section that says “Tap here to see every book that you haven’t shelved”. This could be a quick way to organize what has yet to be having to visually scan for books without a shelf attached.

I recommend going to this “Unshelved” view and multi-selecting a bunch of books and tossing them onto a shelf until this section is empty. At least sorting them once will give you some peace of mind, right? You can always make changes later. I’m definitely a fan of all of these updates. I hope we get a Shelfari-style shelf view in the future where our books are shown on the shelves in a more carousel or horizontal interface design.