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This article was published on July 21, 2016

Google’s new ‘Bubble Zoom’ makes reading digital comic books easy


Google’s new ‘Bubble Zoom’ makes reading digital comic books easy

Google is making it easier to read comics on tablets and smartphones. A new feature for Play books called Bubble Zoom expands speech bubbles on your screen.

Announced at the San Diego Comic-Con, Bubble Zoom tries to guess which speech bubble you may be reading using machine learning. It saves you from having to zoom in around the page, potentially missing part of the narrative.

Bubble Zoom will be made available in the latest version of Google Play Books for Android as a technical preview. It currently supports all Marvel and DC comics, and is limited (for now) to English.

Details are light, but it’s also a technical preview. We’d like to see support for slow or faster readers, and perhaps the ability to scale how ‘zoomed in’ a speech bubble will be.

If you’re not a big comic book fan but still want to give it a shot, Google has a discount code (SDCC2016, naturally) for 50 percent off of select Marvel or DC comics.

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