Bookshelf App Reviews

The app shuts off all the time for no reason.

If you made this read more like a kindle book with graphics I’d probably buy and read more books.

I checked the troubleshooting page for the sync issue, I still haven’t been able to sync my notes to my iPad.. I checked my WiFi and connection already..

After spending gobs of money on these electronic textbooks, I realize the highlighting features are sluggish and buggy, I have no ability to write my own notes in the margins, and I can’t even zoom in on the text to see it better. I’d happily move my textbook, that I bought at a hefty price into a better reading and notes app, but there’s no option for that either. There is something that’s just not right about this. Textbook publishers are crooks!

This app is a joke. You can’t turn the pages easily, you can’t select a page easily, it reads all the in text citations, the support staff are a joke (Mark B) and the support page isn’t clear. Total waste of my previous studying time.

If I could give negative stars I would. The whole point to the app is so I don’t have to go on the website.

Not use friendly, you can't zoom, can't print. Only two highlighter colors, search function does not work properly. I am forced to use this app by the institution I am studying with. Once I'm done it will be deleted off my phone 👎🏼

This app is really bad I have redeemed a code which brought the book in the app ebook. When i downloaded the devita it has disappeared like magic no effort on line brings it back so all i have is the print. The book was pfeifers washington manual of surgical pathology Dr TS

You cannot make flash cards within the app, but you can make them on the webpage. Otherwise a good app to read your digital textbook

Can’t use multiple highlight colors. When I tap to highlight a word and define it, the ui cycles between full screen and toolbars.

Books always disappear. App constantly restarts and doesn’t open on the page that I left off. Schools need to find a better place for students to get their books.

I have several texts that no longer show up on the app despite them actually appearing in my online library. I can access them if I go to the web and utilize the service that way, but it seems as though that defeats the purpose of a standalone app. I hope this is resolved soon. I am on an iPad Pro 11 inch.

I’m giving one star because there is no option for zero stars. I purchased an ebook through Wiley because VitalSource wouldn’t allow me to purchase the book through them because of geo-restrictions, fine, I purchased through Wiley. However, Wiley forces you to use VitalSource in order to read the ebook, fine, but that’s when all the issues started. After purchasing the ebook and redeeming the code, VitalSource, in all their infinite wisdom, decided to lock my account because they detected “fraudulent activity.” What?! I purchased an ebook from one of your strategic partners because you wouldn’t allow me to purchase it from you, and because of the country my credit card info is based at, you detected suspicious activity?? People are now mobile, they move to other countries and reside/visit other places. How about reaching out to me first, with an email to ask before locking my account? Horrible and really aggravating service. It’s been 2 days and have yet to hear from them after sending info to verify my identity. These people are playing with people’s careers and lives. I need access to my study materials VitalSource, stop playing games.

This app doesn’t provide enough students features for highlight, write besides or edit their notes

In iBooks I can book brief with my Apple Pencil on this app I can barely highlight and you cannot read notes at the same time

I typically do not like using ebooks, but VitalSource has a lot of functions such as highlighting, note taking...etc that make it good to use.

I wish the book was more fun ;)

It’s buggy and slow. When you highlight in other devices, the highlight get all messed up. Also, why use Wikipedia when searching for definitions? Use a more professional and scholarly dictionary such as Oxford.

Wish there was some way to convert these. Spent all this money on ebooks, you would think you’d be able to do whatever you want with them and read them through whatever app you want. Probably a bit weird that it bothers me that my books aren’t in iBooks, but spending the money that I did i should be able to do that.

The oversized page finder bar that I don’t want covers up the text that I do want. Oh well. At least it’s free, right?

Pages never in the middle! Never fit the screen! Take you hours to adjust the size to fit the screen even you only want to read for 5 minutes!

This app holds my textbooks in my Apple IPad really well and it’s easy to browse. One suggestion I could make is to give an option to go to a page number for quicker reference browsing.

I on’t want to keep highlighting my book from one device to another. It said that it should sync between devices, and I’ve tried the suggestions on the faq of the website. It still doesn’t work. Please fix. Thank you.

Meaning: doesn’t function STILL!!! After refusing to access MY TEXTBOOK, that I paid additional money for - JUST for the digital version, because of ALLLLL the various issues with this app (both online and downloadable), I came back AFTER A YEAR-new classes-new semesters-JUST TO EXPERIENCE THE EXACT SAME ISSUES. *** “VITALSOURCE” - ARE YOU GUYS KIDDING ME!?!*** -STILL Sluggish. -STILL won’t highlight properly. -STILL exports micro small degraded export... I normally just bite my tongue if I DON’T HAVE ANYTHING GOOD TO SAY, but AFTER A WHOLE YEAR- REALLY!?! We (Students) pay hundreds of dollars for these digital versions-(because we have no other choice) - and then find out that THEY STILL DON’T (AFTER A YEAR) FUNCTION!!! I couldn’t believe it, I tried giving you the benefit of doubt. So, after working all night at the hospital I waited until I got home to see maybe if it was the hospitals internet-as if. But NO, ITS JUST THE SAME EXACT ISSUES THAT WERE THERE A YEAR AGO. I feel ripped off, but I see that I’m not the only one now as many others here have expressed THE EXACT SAME ISSUES. That, and having more than adequate time to address these issues, is why I feel compelled to not bite my tongue and let others know... -I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS APPLICATION.

Most of my books are on this app for school, it can be a bit sensitive sometimes, but it gets the job done

The little book people are kawaii. Love it.

I’m going to return my ebook purchase. Routledge indicated that these books could be transferred to your own ereader app, but Vitalsource makes no clear statement about how to do this. And this app offers a terrible experience along with a requirement that one create an account with them. Avoid.

Once I downloaded the app, I assumed I would be able to annotate notes and highlight items in my books with my Apple Pencil. I was wrong. I also assumed I would be able to pick different highlighted colors even after an item is highlighted. Once again, I was wrong. Hopefully soon the development of this app will only get better and show real improvements such as adding the above suggestions. I can only hope.

I don’t even want this s***** app, and now I’ve got to go through multiple apps for every ebook it seems, like I’m actually having to rummage through a backpack again. Amazon won, just let me use my kindle for cengage books!

Can you put a feature in the app to be able to just scribble notes onto the book? The highlight feature is nice but it would be nice to quickly jot down notes too.

Only in the big biz of textbooks can a company get away with having such an awful app while still making enough profit. So buggy, so few features, the least intuitive high-lighting and “note-taking” imaginable. I can’t get down a page without it crashing. I would switch between devices to use whatever less buggy at the time but you can only be checked into two devices at a time. I hate this, if I could afford the real textbook, I would get it in a a heartbeat.

Great app

Have been using this app for grad school. Would be nice if the developers can fix the tools. Highlighting and making notes is difficult and quite frustrating for the end user. Hope that this gets fixed soon.

Cannot open books 😢😁

I can literally sign into this app on one device to read the text; yet be told my username is invalid when I attempt to watch any of the videos from any device at all. I can try to sign in from multiple devices to no avail; the videos will not work. I feel as though I’m set up to fail. I feel as though this course is pointless if this text is the only source.

Great, I can download my textbooks. Sadly, I cannot read them. The full page of the texts don’t display. And if you are visually impaired, forget zooming in and wanting to read. Moving the page around doesn’t work. Rather, you just miss out on everything outside of the zoom. And then you miss out on even more because putting the text size back to ant-sized (like I said before) won’t even show you all the text that way! Seriously...who designed this?! Wish I could upload a pic of how far out I have to de-zoom to see the ENTIRE page

I am never able to access any items from the app. I have tried time and again, restarting, refreshing, logging in and out and nothing works even though I am able to access all my texts online via my desktop the app always says my library is empty. Useless!!

A shameful attempt to reinvent PDF with DRM. Only use it because I must.

I hate when textbook providers force you to use this horrible app that provides zero benefits. Would 1000x rather look at a simple PDF. Can print a small number of pages to PDF but it saves as an image of the page so that you can’t have the benefit of selecting or searching for text and the resulting files are MASSIVE. Can’t wait for the day I can finally delete this off of my iPad

I love this app it lets me read even if I don’t have my laptop. It makes my life so much easier.

Good for save money and spaceport textbooks. I use iPad pro(one model old)and had no trouble. Easy to search words, smooth to next page.

All of a sudden an update causes 3 of 4 books to no longer be supported. No one mentioned this when books purchased in this format.

The interface is not intuitive. I can read my 5 dollar books on any e-reader app and have more tools available to me. This is a higher learning app. Higher education is one of the top grossing markets in the United States. VitalSource should have jammed this full of features. We students deserve better than this for the amount of debt we’re agreeing to and the amount of money colleges are paying for computer learning software access. iPhone 8+ not impressed nor am I impressed on my iPad mini 4.

First off, the reading order for audio mode on textbooks is totally broken. This app is glitchy as all h*** and I can’t believe they couldn’t bother to go through the text and make sure it even HIGHLIGHTS properly with the common two-column layout. Desktop version isn’t any better. Can’t even download the book to adobe digital editions with drm cause VS has their own proprietary format for a dang PDF.

Me gustan sus libros de Hvac

Crashes all of the time , but when it actually works it is a great idea.

I wish the CFA Institute would stop using this app for electronic books. This app keeps crashing and also won’t allow me to highlight half the time. Absolutely terrible 👎🏾

Please fix the reader where if you live the app it can’t load the page where you left off and random crashing. Thanks!

It’s ok.

Something happened, and now when I try to open it, it tells me I need to update the app. The app IS up to date according to the App Store. I’m en educator, and can’t access my textbooks. Great. Thanks a lot, VitalSource. Never had problems with CourseSmart. The solution was to delete the app, download it, sign back in, and download all my books again.... Time-consuming during exams!

Won't open a book that I supposed to be linked by its publisher to this crummy app for viewing. Initially I got a message that the app needed to be updated but the update did not update enough, I guess.

When I try to create my account the form disappears

One can highlight with finger or pencil in this app but it is very clunky. You have to first long press a word, then take the pencil off a drag where you want the end of the highlight to be. Then lift the pencil and click on highlight as the desired action. I am sure apple has published some best practices on UX with the pencil, and I hope this app uses them soon as I have to use it for my textbooks at my college. I will update my review if something changes before i graduate.

Love this app as it works so well with my university textbooks!

Easy to use, I take plenty of notes, I love it

It’s a decent app but the the voice change is not working for the read text aloud option. I’ve followed the directions to change the voice but the voice on the app doesn’t change but it remains the same voice even with the change i made in the settings.

The app is no longer working to open books on the iPad despite updating book list.

I have over 30 books it is great read them anywhere, anytime . I enjoy the app, works perfect.

Overall, I love this app! It’s very convenient, you can read book everywhere EVEN without internet. It will be even better for both educators and students if 1) it allows users to create customized folders to better organize the books 2) make it more compatible with notes taking and highlighting. For example, it will be fantastic if users can mark and make notes on the book using Apple Pencil or other tools. I am a colleague educator and will use it more if these functions are available! Thank you very much for developing this wonderful educational app! :)

I am an instructor in a PTA program, and I am unable to open any of my textbooks. If anyone can help me with this problem, I will be happy to upgrade your rating.

Liking the the digital textbook app. I normally prefer having a tangible book to make notations & highlight, however, this has surpassed my expectations. Wish highlighting came in more colors than just 2.

It’s awesome.

Better used on an iPad or iPhone as an app then a computer or through the internet. Very poor search function!

Makes the book reading experience awesome with features like audio!

The app gives you directions to “change the voice” that don’t actually change the voice. Why not just build downloadable voices into the app?

My books are gone and the app is definitely not working!

However, every. single. time. I close it I can count on it crashing multiple times when I try to reload it. It’s very frustrating to have to wait 5+ minutes for it to restart

I am using this app for going back to school and listening to my books. It works really well I am very happy with it, but after this last update it does not save in your settings. For example, I turned up the speed of the reader but whenever I stop using the app and then go back into it it reset. The only other thing is while driving to work my screen is off and then when I get to work I turn the screen back on so that I can book market any can’t find what page it was reading on. Other than those two things it’s an awesome app!

This is terrible! I would give 0 stars if I could! There is no way to highlight or take notes. It says there is but I spent 2 hours trying to get it to work and couldn’t figure it out. Trying to turn the page the screen just flips not doesn’t to go to the next page. Worst eReader I have seen! Don’t waste your time.

If you want to scroll through books at dial-up speeds or have constant crashes if you search for a term with too many search results (over 100 is too many), then you will love this app.

Not worth listing the issues that I am having.

It would be useful if the books would read page by pGe like a yip also book instead of having to scroll down AND swipe left to right

It’s awesome

This is probably the worst reader out there. Does not highlight correctly. Page scrolling is a nightmare. Stay away from this reader. The only reason I bought it is because the book I needed was not available for Kindle, terrible

I can’t stand the fact that I keep losing my college books cause they expire and I can’t get them back. It’s not the best app I’ve used.

This app was recommended by my College to read my textbook on. Every time I go to read it, it says my app needs to be updated in order to open the book. I go to the App Store and there is nothing indicating me to update the app. This app has officially become useless. I was looking forward to being able to study on the go, as I am a working mom.

I like vitalsource through the webpage. It’s convenient to be able to have your books anywhere. But it’s pointless if the view of the books is like a PDF, and you have to scroll. Please make it like the webpage version. Where the text covers the width of the screen, and it can be read continuously. Similar to how iPhone does reader. If that happens the app will be awesome!

Great app but highlights from people I follow won’t show up on IOS but show up on my desktop app. Use to work but doesn’t anymore.

Yay

I’m trying to access my book and it’s saying that I have to update the app to open my book. I come to the App Store and there’s no update available. What’s going on!?

While it's handy to have textbooks on a single (small) device versus carrying around a book, it doesn't help if the book won't open! When I open the app, my books show up in the list but they won't open. And filtering them is useless because the app gets stuck on a different page & wont even go back to the book list. So this is a total, frustrating waste of time.

My book reads off a lot of different bulleted items and it says “black small square” most the time when it encounters these bullet points... other times it doesn’t mention the bullet points which is kind of inconvenient too because then it becomes confusing to discern when one bullet starts and one ends –unless you’re looking at the book–which I’m shouldn’t need to do because I’m using the read aloud feature. Other times the program freezes on these “black small square” lists and I need to reopen the program and skip to the next normal paragraph. I DID VERY POORLY IN CLASS YESTERDAY WHEN WE PLAYED JEOPARDY BECAUSE OF THIS :(. Please fix. My book is “nursing today trends and transitions” 9th edition by zerwech

I like this app so far because I can take my textbooks and read them offline for school. I originally downloaded it for read aloud while I drive or while i am on the go.. but I can’t change the read aloud voice! This would’ve been five stars if I could use the Siri voice. I followed the prompts to change it, and it doesn’t change.

It’s sooooooo hard to use. I have to use it because of the institution put their ebook on there... I wondered if they did this on purpose so that will make people wanna buy their printouts...

Because I entered a different email when checking out, I can no longer access all my books. I was told by customer support that if I changed the email on my account it would correct the problem. It did not. Also, the notes do not sync between platforms. So the notes I take on the mobile app are useless in class on my computer. If I had known how poor the functionality was, I would’ve spent the extra money on the physical textbooks. I do not recommend this app at all. There are much better, more consistent, ways to take notes and read electronic texts.

Today’s update, 20 December 2018, was a giant step forward in that the user is now able to search across all books on the bookshelf. A global search is executed from the new home page layout and presents the user with a list of books (scrolled across the top of the page) where the search term was found. Clicking on a specific title will display all the hits found in that title. Clicking on a link from a selected title will take the user to the text within the book where the search term is located. When the Home icon is clicked, the user is returned to the global search to explore the other hits that match the search term. Another new feature is the carousel-like display (reminiscent of the first Kindle Fire display) of the most recently read titles. Congratulations to the development team for these latest enhancements. They added real value to the app and greatly enhance the user’s access to content. It would be great if, eventually, the Apple Pencil or other styluses could be used to write or draw on the pages of ebooks—which would be most useful for academic purposes.

I am using this app by necessity to study for CFA exams. I would love to have the ability to highlight and annotate with my Apple Pencil instead of having to use primitive technology. Please invest in an apple-pencil friendly update that would allow handwriting in the textbook.

The new home screen is so dumb. Why not just open to my books instead of making me click to go to my library. Also why do I have to constantly go through the table of contents! Don’t close the contents bar for me and bring it back to the units just because I click on something! Really hate this app.

This is not a functional app, especially for educational purposes. First of all, many of the services provided by the desktop app are not available through the mobile version. It is somewhat understandable for some of the more complex features offered in other apps, such as Microsoft Office, but in a reading app I feel that there is no excuse. For one thing, in the desktop version it will use a primitive text-to-speech (TTS) program to enable you to listen while working on something else. This would be much better applied to a mobile version, or does that make too much sense? There are other issues that prevent the mobile version from being a success, but all of them, including the TTS should be an easy fix with an update. Overall, a very frustrating app that could be great with just a little tweaking.

Very poor design and continues to crash everytime it is opened for more than 5 minute or when switching apps.

My University has me use this for my online reading. Frankly it is unusable! you can only highlight in 2colors even though others are shown. You can’t underline. If you inact the voice feature it always jumps to the beginning of the Chapter and not where you at currently at. It won’t maintain your language selection and frankly the app often acts as if it is possessed, it’ll jump between chapters. i’ve tried to reset it but now it won’t load my book. Hopeless!

First, it disables the auto shut down on iPads and iPhones and drains the battery. It is ONLY black and white - no night reading options to change to grey or black backgrounds with white lettering. WORST - I downloaded a book. It shows as having 23 pages! Why? Because each chapter is a page! Try keeping track of where you are reading when one page really equals 15 to 30 pages. If you vary even a little from vertical when scrolling down it flips you to the next chapter/page. When you go back - guess what- you’re at the beginning of the chapter and have to find where you were.

Editing tools are very poor

I can not understand the voice bookshelf uses and I can’t change the voice for real aloud function. Can you please fix this! It is not due to my phone voice control either, it’s set at Siri.

I’ve experienced contacting “the help” desk a couple of times, until I really pressed it felt unresponsive. Had issues with their server not syncing with my iPad. Seemed to happen post one of their upgrades yet there was no accountability on their side for testing or managing their process. I’ll stick to good old text books because studying for a big exam only to lose all your past work, well you can imagine.

My workflow is terrible when I use publisher’s default web apps. Yes, I do mean you WW Norton and Red Shelf! Having the text in Vital Source’s ebook version is as close Robert actually reading it in book form.

Love having my nursing school books with me at all times! Just wish there was a way when I listen to my book there would be a way to set a range of pages to be read, say pages 995-999 and it will stop reading when it gets to the end. Or it could another preselected page range, say pages 995-998,pages 556-557,etc... Might not be able to happen but it would make a great app even better!

This app is garbage. No option to increase text font size? Call amazon and get a clue.

This app (and the website and desktop application) are extremely buggy and have been for years (source: I’ve been using it since 2014). Unfortunately most users don’t have another option (textbook companies direct eBooks to vital source) and as a result, it seems the company is unwilling to fix the issues. To compound the issue, none of their tools are intuitive. You can easily spend an hour trying to figure out how to do something that should be simple. Will update if I encounter a tool/capability that doesn’t make me want to rip all of my hair out.

I use this app alongside Goodnotes so I can take notes and read. It functions perfectly when I’m using it like this. However, when I leave the app to respond to a text or just take a break, when I come back, it typically crashes. Then to open Bookshelf again is a bit tricky because when I go to reopen the app, it sometims just gives me a blank screen until I try again and then on the third try or so it’ll open again.

Spent over 200 for a textbook that forced me to use this app to read the book. The app spends all its time in buffer mode. Can’t read the textbook. My advice to other students give this app a pass-find other textbooks from other publishers. Don’t waste your loan money on this piece of kluge.

I love the search feature but when I try to search for a specific phrase from my textbook I try to select the one I want to jump to and it always just stays on the same page I was already on.

This app is terrible. It’s almost impossible to read the textbooks, the way the pages are set up doesn’t make any sense (you have to swipe sometimes to switch the page which doesn’t even work sometimes; some pages have the page numbers, while others don’t), plus the search function DOES NOT WORK. This app needs an update that fixes the search function and makes it so you can see which chapter and section you are in when you are reading a page. There’s no way to know where you are in the text unless you pull up the index on the side and look at the page numbers.

This has been the worst e reading of my life. You are not able to swipe to the next page. Instead your entire textbook is one long pdf style file. Have you ever wanted to scroll through 400 whole pages? Nows your chance! If you accidentally scroll too fast, you will hopelessly lose your place! Who doesn’t love that?

Horrible! Always re-freshes or loses connection, which causes me to lose my page. Every time I go to highlight- it loses the connection:(. If my university didn’t force me to use this company, I would send my business elsewhere. My time is valuable and I don’t have time to look for a page I already had found. Please fix you app/website!

Easy to use. Great for renting college textbooks through Routledge.

Ok in a pinch but not as good as the web based version.

Major of my books are on here. It started to crash again.You developers need to fix this!!!!!!

The pharmacology book I bought is in ePub format, so I don’t see why I couldn’t just download it on iBooks to begin with. I would assume they’re pretty good about not allowing users to share books. I can’t think of another reason you’d force users into a proprietary app that is free. Reading the reviews, it looks as though the developers do update this app because I saw an option for night mode which someone had wanted. Here’s what I’d like: 1. Better highlighting, especially with Apple Pencil. This hold and drag business is ridiculous 2. Changed chapter/page format. Each chapter being a page, I can see where that would sound convenient in a meeting but if your chapter is 30+ pages long it’s rather inconvenient to keep scrolling. That’s all so far. Thanks! Oh last thing-people are on here rating 5 stars because you can read the book offline with the app-you bought this book. You should be able to view it anywhere, just as you would a physical book. That’s not an amazing feature, that’s basic ebooks. I hope my concerns are addressed but either way I appreciate fewer natural resources being used to make a textbook that I have to have anyway.

I really want to like it but there are still some major issues. The figures or pictures in the textbook can’t be zoomed in so you are stuck try to change the font size to get a slightly bigger figure. Then the highlighting feature works occasionally. It’s frustrating. I’ve used the inkling app and it was perfect. Look to inkling on how to do it.

I enjoy book shelf I only wish that on here I could have the tool to highlight. It is very important for my studies and so that in a month or 2 I would be able Togo back and find my notes. Another tool that I feel is necessary is search of a word that height lights this word throughout your chapter. Will you at anytime have this available for regular books not just academic reading. I will recommend Book Shelf to every one. Idelia

ooga booga school bad. cheese good

This is the worst app I have ever had the misfortune to be forced to use. I’m in grad school in 2018 at a high priced university and this is the best we can do? Scrolling is a nightmare. No page numbers to reference. Loading is ridiculously slow. There is nothing intuitive about navigation whatsoever. Text-to-speech....you should be embarrassed. Siri can read my text messages at an intelligible level, but reading a textbook is indistinguishable from the TI Speak-n-spell from 1978!!! Not a typo. It sounds like 40-year-old technology in an age where you can carry around terabytes of information in your pocket. I can’t believe this was duct taped into the app and heralded as a feature. How the reviews of this thing are so high is beyond me. Garbage. Absolute garbage.

I use this app for hours on a daily basis since I’m in nursing school. The one thing I’ve found that is somewhat annoying & should be fixed is not being able to consistently swipe to the previous or proceeding page(s). It always gets jammed & it’s frustrating. Thank you.

It’s very bugging, it freezes constantly, and jolts when I tried to make highlights.

This app is super basic. The highlighting feature is frustrating! Anytime i want to highlight a text next to a picture or on a narrow part of the page the it selects a bunch of other text i don’t want to highlight. The biggest frustration for me is not being able to write on the page. You can write notes but it’s not the same as being able to write anywhere on the page with my Apple Pencil and being able to see it at a glance. Other apps such as onedrive that was not design as a reading app has more functionality than bookshelf. Unfortunately i could not get this particular book as a PDF otherwise i would have used Onedrive instead. This app still has a long way to go.

This app is used for textbooks, I find it crashing on both the Mac and iPad, this is unacceptable. The app seems to recover position etc when I restart but I frequently have to restart. Could use some improvement on the citations as well, should send out APA perfectly and not require tweaking.

Easy access to textbooks. Very user friendly.

I really enjoy the features of being able to read my books. I like having the continuous chapters. I like that audible feature that reads the pages for you. Also, if you go to one book to another you never lose your place. Very well designed.

This App does everything I need it to. I can take all my textbooks with me wherever I go and I can read anytime I want. I really like that I can listen to the book as I read. I don’t have any complaints.

Believe the bad reviews.

I am not sure when this app was actually created, but holy moly it feels old. The app is so basic, and the functionally is so laggy, it feels like your back in 2010. If you’re looking for a nostalgic way to read, and like spending an extra 30 seconds to highlight text, this app is for you!!

Bookshelf is so much better than Cengage. I like how you just need to click on the book and it automatically transfers to the Bookshelf app , the only to do is just download the book through the app and it ready to use .

The main benefit of this app is that it is more mobile than the website. However, this app is buggy and is missing some basic features that completely remove the mobile advantage. They force you to frequently type your email and password just to use the app (there is no way to stay logged in), and the “read aloud” function is terrible. The low quality of the voice on my device is understandable because they use your device’s built-in speech engine, but they don’t set up their books to be read correctly by speech engines. Many words on the page are broken into their individual letters, resulting in words being spelled out one letter at a time. All footnotes are announced for every page, so I hope you enjoy having your book interrupted about once a minute to hear about all the legal restrictions on how you can use the book. On top of that, some of the text is skipped and other text that wasn’t even there before is added in. Divisions between chapters are not clearly marked, leaving you confused about the context. Why would I ever decide to use this app when I can use the larger screen of one of many public computers that are increasingly available to everyone, or my laptop which is easy to bring anywhere?

Absolutely ridiculous to pay for an ebook and not get the pdf file to use as needed in other platforms.

Yes

I use this app for one of my school textbooks and was very disappointed today when I went to open my book and I keep getting an error saying I need to update the app, but I already have the most up to date version for iOS. Please fix as my ability to complete assigned reading material and study for tests and quizzes is somewhat dependent on this app working correctly! It’s bad enough I had to open a ticket just to get my books to be available on the app. *edit* I tried pressing “update library” and that resolved the issue. I had been reading my book on a different device and apparently it does not automatically sync to the current spot. Some clarification on the verbiage for a future release or the ability to automatically sync between devices would be helpful, but otherwise I’m just glad it’s working 😊

I cannot take notes with my Apple Pencil on the text book. Please add that function

Absolutely a terrible app, I’d give them zero stars if I could. Nothing works properly. I’ve been emailing back and forth with support to find a solution and I still cannot even open my textbook in the app. Do yourself a favor and buy a physical copy of your textbook because buying the digital copy is a huge waste of time. Their website is awful too and I am so angry I wasted my money on this.

The highlight function needs a lot of work. And the text to speech makes no sense. It would read half of a paragraph the jump to the other side of page only to jump back afterwards. The it starts to read things not even on the page. This app is poorly designed and schools should look elsewhere for better apps

I am a new user and my mind is blown by how much you can use electronic versions similar to a hard copy.

My ebook does not even open, I have been sitting here for 40 minutes trying to read it.

I am wanting to those who use this app that it is not as smooth as it used to be on the iPhone as intended. One of the students at college I work likened this to the eReader from the 90s while on a palm pilot.

This app is very convenient

I travel for work ~75%. This app allows me to hook my phone up to my car’s blue tooth and use the reading tool so I can listen to my assigned text reading as I drive. I can also put my earbuds in and listen through my phone app as I fly. It has saved me hours of reading time! I can listen to the chapters over and over all while I travel. It has seriously impacted my study habits and grades. Thank you!!!!

Easy to access your textbook, but the UI is pretty awful on iPad. Complete pain to highlight text and no other way to mark up the pages. Could use a pretty large overhaul... Plenty of better apps out there...

It would be helpful if one could add books in the app itself. Second, in review question books it would be immensely useful if we could toggle from questions to answers. Right now I use the app only to watch the videos.

The app is a decent app but what needs to happen is that the app needs to be optimized so I can put my book codes in on my iOS device instead of an android device.

Book navigation is awful, pages are poorly laid out. If the device is vertical the text will be awkwardly zoomed in without an option to zoom out. The ebook looks worse then the physical book which just means it’s hard to distinguish between different sections, portions of it look like they were designed in html in 2003 Also you cannot search for your book through the app you have to go on a web browser to add it. Once book has been added to the account you cannot view it while on WiFi on a tablet you must download it.

Terrible reading experience. Always waiting for page to load. The only reason the business is around is s***** publisher using them. The web and app on tablet are horrible.

On iPhone SE, if you try to add a note in landscape mode, the “save” button is offscreen. This is a minor annoyance except when the app gets stuck in landscape and you now cannot exit the note editor. When you switch to landscape, the page progress bar area is blank. You have to rotate, tap to bring up that bar, then tap again to dismiss it to get full use of screen space.

The highlighting option is difficult to use. If maybe we could just push a button to highlight and just select instead of having to select a word and then highlight.

The book cuts off at the bottom, making it extremely difficult to read the full page. I can only have an ebook with this textbook since the physical copy is over 200 dollars. I got this app thinking it would make my life easier so I can actually have the text with me, but this is ridiculous. I can even read the full page.

The ease of carrying textbooks in my wallet via iPhone or in my bag via iPad is incredible. Highlights can be one letter or a page and also transfer.

This app is too difficult to use. The pages are impossible to navigate, it constantly crashes, the app always lags as it tries to navigate a PDF (it’s one job). Do not use this app. If you have an option try to get your books onto iBooks because not only is it predownloaded on your iPad, it doesn’t lag, the navigation works fine, and there are plenty of options for how you want to navigate your textbook. I would rate zero stars if I could.

I like the app! Not having to carry around textbooks is always a plus for me. I do wish the app offered a nighttime reading setting or a way to change the coloring to make it a little easier on the eyes. Other than that, I enjoy it.

This app is inconvenient to use because there is no option to write directly onto the page for those of us who use smart styluses. The reason this app seemed interesting is because the ebook version of the required textbook is much less expensive, but if we don’t have the option to write directly onto it, then what’s the point anymore? Might as well just buy the actual physical textbook