Inappropriate material on Google play books next to childrens books

[CaptainDug]

I'm new here. I joined because I want to make people aware of the google play website. On our daughter's 11th birthday you conceded to buy her a tablet. she wanted a kindle fire - but we bought her the Tesco Hudl. like many schools now her school will let her take a tablet to school providing it is used for reading. this android machine uses the normal google play for apps and books. as we guessed she first looked at games and the google play website has a tab at the top showing the top free games. she searched and downloaded a few. next we persuade her to look at google play books. There is a children's books category and she search through but they were listed alphabetically with a wide range of prices not many free ones for her to start with. so she looked again and found like with the free games there was a tab for the top free books. OUCH! this is a mixture of kids book and adults books where 'Little Bad Wolf' (childrens book) was next to '50 sex tips for men' complete with explicit cover picture.
I quickly navigated away from that page and waited until she went to school. I went back to the google play books site and checked the setting - what a relief to find a contents filter. I turned the filter on to maximum and reloaded the page - Ouch!! this list of top free books were still available to see. I was shocked.
Even in a newsagent the adult books and childrens books are separated so that innocent children do not accidentally stumble over something inappropriate.

An eleven year old girl does not have her own bank cards and so if she is to look for books to download herself she is bound to look in the top free books section.

I rechecked the childrens book section, but although there are many sub-categories there is no 'free books category' for children to use.

After much web searching I found a phone number to contact Google play direct and I Spoke to a very nice rep who was as concerned as myself. He did say he can't change anything himself but sent an email to me with a form to send to the google developers. He said if enough people wrote in about this inappropriate material the website may get changed and block this content to children, they may even add a separate childrens free books search.

And so I write this blog now to get as many people to use this link to the developers and please send up as many similar concerns to google play books.
hopefully with enough contacts google will change their website and protect the innocence of our children.

thanks for any comments and support
Concerned parent
Doug
PS contact for google play books is below

support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/contact/survey

[Tuckshop]

Thanks for this CaptainDug, I have just found the exact problem you describe and searched Mumsnet for how to solve this, as there is always someone on here who has had the same issue and can give advice. I've reported it to Google too.