Feedback != Complaining

The difference is subtle, but important.

Feedback: "I would use your product more if it did x."

Complaining: "Your product sucks because it doesn't do x."

In short: you're absolutely correct. Making it easier to complain doesn't help. Making it easier to give feedback does help.

No: what's necessary is listening, both to complaints and feedback. Having a massive data sink doesn't help.

Agreed. In my experience Google is notoriously bad at customer service of all types, and attempts to share constructive feedback are ignored. So making it easier to provide feedback is worthless if you don't have a system to actually interpret and implement that feedback. I think it's simply a move to make the user feel like their suggestions are valued.

Exactly my damn point. Reading is important too. snark

By curiosity, what features? I have "Google Play Books" but haven't used it much.

Google Play Books is not books.google.com, which has all the public domain books they got from public libraries.

The specific functionality they took away is devastating to regular users like me. When searching, results would show if a book was already in your library. You could also add it to a shelf from the search result itself. Now the search results lack that info and you must click on each result to see if it's one you already saw. This is sheer hell for discovering books that weren't there between searches.

[edit for URL fix]