Google Play Offers Over 5M eBooks And More Than 18M Songs, One Year After Its Rebranding

Google has just announced via its official blog that Google Play is officially one year old today. The actual marketplace itself is older than that, with the Android Market debuting in 2008, but it has been a year since Google changed the store’s branding to reflect its broader purpose, which extends to media and use on platform besides its mobile OS. Google rehashed some of its previous milestones, but shed some new light on the size of two of its media categories: eBooks and music.

The Google Play store now has over 5 million eBook titles, according to Google, up from the four million the company reported via its support site last year. The music store is at over 18 million tracks, a number which is just about on par with streaming services like Rdio. Apple has around 30 million tracks in iTunes be comparison, and Amazon has roughly 19 million, so just above Google Play.

The new numbers accompany existing figures made public previously by Google, including the 700,000 apps that now reside on Google Play, which have led to over 25 billion app downloads. Google also reiterated its 500 million total Android device activations and 1.3 million activations per day in an email, both of which were made public late last year.

For Google, growing the media ecosystem available in Play and making it available to a growing number of customers worldwide is a key element of making sure its ecosystem can compete with those offered by Apple and Amazon, and judging by these latest figures, it appears to be doing well in building the library.