If, like a favorite novel, a good e-reader is something you want to return to again and again, the current version of Google Books will gather plenty of digital dust sitting on our shelves. Admittedly, first impressions aren’t bad: the app includes three free classics, and with three million titles in Google’s eBookstore, there’s plenty more where those came from. The contents of your Google Books library—including purchases, samples, and your places in them—sync to your Google account, so everything you’re interested in appears on all your devices simultaneously, just a download away. Unfortunately for heavy readers, your library can’t be reorganized by title or author, but at least the most recently read book appears at the top.

At least you won’t get a paper cut.
 
Navigating books works as you expect—taps or swipes to turn pages, and extensive viewing options let you invert text, choose from seven fonts, and even view a book’s original scanned pages—a feature best enjoyed on the iPad’s roomy screen. A magnifying glass tool helps somewhat, but since it only lets you zoom in on a small area of each page, it’s no good for reading (it is, sadly, the only way to enlarge images).
 
But like a bad Stephen King novel, we’ve saved the worst for last. Incredibly, you can’t make notes, look up words, view pages horizontally, or even create bookmarks. Until these basic features are added, we don’t see a good reason to curl up with Google Books.