# Google Books

22 Hacker News commenters recommended Google Books and 19 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend Google Books for public domain books, old magazines and newspapers, and historical research. Critics agree that previews cut off after a few pages and search results have declined.

## Why people recommend it

- Finding DRM-free ebook files (3 comments): "I’ve bought Tor books from Google Play and gotten DRM‐free EPUB files from it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48711354)) "Key marker for DRM‐free: “Content protection: This content is DRM free.”" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47684550)) "Yes, Kobo, Google Play Books both carry them." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48712437))
- Public domain books and periodicals (2 comments): "Since I pretty much only use Google Books for public domain books, old magazines, and newspapers I haven't noticed any problem with it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46770264)) "I like to use Google books to refer to old issues of PC Magazine." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48853195))
- Broad access to world knowledge (2 comments): "for a brief, glorious moment Google came closest to achieving the dream of making accessible all the world's knowledge" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50188258)) "one of the greatest storehouses of readily available knowledge in the world" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49389914))
- Good for historical research (2 comments): "Google Books helped me many time to find manuscripts or old books that were not OCR'd properly." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46787942)) "it's now much easier to extract historical data from old documents from Google Books" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49619665))

## What people warn about

- Search results have degraded (4 comments): "Google Books is long dead. If you click on the author's name in one of the results, it will search inauthor:"Author's Name" and this search will return garbage" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771415)) "Google has seemingly entirely removed search functionality from most books" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46770175)) "Overnight the results went from pretty good to absolute trash." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46769291))
- Previews cut off after few pages (2 comments): "Reading a preview in Google Books helps but you only get so many pages before you're cut off" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47812194)) "Whenever I need something from Google Books I inevitably reach the message that this is a limited preview and the part I need is not included." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49388776))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Goodreads-trained book recommendation model](https://hackerapproved.com/p/goodreads-trained-book-recommendation-model.md): 25 recommend
- [HackerBooks by DOSAYGO-STUDIO](https://hackerapproved.com/p/hackerbooks.md): 22 recommend
- [Shepherd book recommendations](https://hackerapproved.com/p/shepherd.md): 5 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://play.google.com/store/books)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Google Books", https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-books/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).