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In the Google Play Books Android application, there is an option to keep an ebook on a device if the user wants to do it. So when you decide to do such a thing, the ebook may be stored somewhere on the Android device. I would like to know where the ebook is stored. I searched in /mnt/storage and I only found Aldiko ebooks (in the /mnt/storage/eBooks folder), not the Google Play eBooks.

Thanks for your answsers.

PS : if it can help, I do this on an Archos G9 101 tablet.

air-dex
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3 Answers3

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I checked several sources on this. Googles own help page states:

The Google Play Books app automatically stores books in the location with the most free space, whether that's your device or your SD card, as of when the app was first launched. If you've upgraded your app, your books will continue to be stored in the same location they were before the upgrade.

Which is not very precise. A discussion on the Archos forum reveals a setting available in the app (Settings> Storage location), but there you can only chose between internal and external storage. But the same thread as well as another one on XDA reveal the path as being /data/data/com.google.android.apps.books/ (which is the apps data directory on internal storage), the Archos forums thread also mentioning Android/data/com.google.android.apps.books/files/volumes/, which could apply to the "external storage".

As I don't use Google Books, maybe you could check those locations and confirm.

Note that accessing /data/data/* requires "root powers". Without that, you probably won't see anything in that place.

Izzy
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  • I looked at /mnt/storage/Android/data/ but I did not find any folder called com.google.android.apps.books. As for the other folder, /data/data/com.google.android.apps.books/, I found him thanks to Android Terminal Emulator but I cannot access to its content. If there is not any other solution, I will root my device to see the content of that folder. I will tell you what I found in this /data/data/com.google.android.apps.books/ folder in a next comment. – air-dex Aug 05 '12 at 23:51
  • You've set the app to use "internal storage", I guess? You could also try to set it to "external storage", then the folder on the SD-card should appear. But I'm not sure whether the app would move already existing books over (I rather doubt that). – Izzy Aug 06 '12 at 06:03
  • If I refer to these question ( http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/26163/what-is-internal-and-external-storage ), my Google Play Books application uses "internal storage". To make it use "external storage", it seems that I need to root the tablet. But I am not ready to take the risk of rooting it or installing CFWs and ROMs on it. That's why I decide to drop this search if rooting is really a necessity. I wanted to do this to backup my Google Play eBooks and there are other ways to do it. – air-dex Aug 17 '12 at 01:23
  • Folder doesn't seem to exist on my android phone (oneplus one) – hasen Apr 11 '15 at 18:25
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    @hasen Are you sure your device is rooted, and you've looked as "root"? Otherwise you won't be able to access folders below /data/data. – Izzy Apr 11 '15 at 19:33
  • @Izzy My device is not rooted. I didn't know that was required for this trick to work .. – hasen Apr 14 '15 at 16:43
  • @hasen good point – added that fact to my answer. Obviously I was considering to many things "general knowledge" which are not :) – Izzy Apr 14 '15 at 16:51
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If you want to add books you downloaded on your computer, the books are stored in: /data/data/com.google.android.apps.books/files/accounts/{your google account}/volumes, and when you are inside the "volumes" folder you will see some folders with a name that is some code for that book. Once you click one of those folders you will see 2 .png files: those are the cover of the book.

Matthew Read
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cv98
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You can select "enable PDF uploading". This will allow you select all your books and upload to your Google account. That way, you can read from any device by just signing in. And you can select to view offline.

This reduces the amount of data needed on your device.

ale
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AlvynFash
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  • The uploaded PDF files are downloaded in whole when I start reading them, and this downloaded format takes a lot more space than the original PDF files. – Tianyang Li Dec 07 '14 at 20:30