Android: Today Google Play Books gets a new tab called Discover, which aims to help you find your next book.

It's nice to immediately find what book you're looking for with a quick search, but part of the magic of libraries and bookstores is stumbling upon great books you weren't looking for. These tips can make exploring Google Books feel more like that.

If digitising a historic collection of books is important to you, you can purchase a ridiculously expensive commercial scanner. Or you can make a prototype version from Google Books using a vacuum cleaner, a scanner and other components for a lot less.

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Windows: GooReader is a desktop application for Google Books that allows you to search, read and even download the books and magazines you find.

Windows: Thanks to Google's drive to add more and more books to the Google Books project, including thousands of public domain volumes, you'll find quite a nice selection to choose from. Google Book Downloader helps you download them to PDF.