eBooks by Inkling Reviews

I have been using eBooks for long time and it was fairly good when I first used it (apart from some annoying issues in photo imaging). Unfortunately, it got worse and worse to the point where I cannot use it at all now. In addition to the many faulty issues that other reviewers pointed out here, now, I cannot even open any e-book I bought and downloaded in my book library! It just says loading when I open any title with empty white page. I deleted eBooks and reinstalled it but no change. I am very disappointed with this and stopped buying from the store anymore. Now I’m forced to use other apps to buy and download medical books and what’s really upsetting is that I cannot read my already purchased books in eBooks anymore, and they’re not cheap books. I was really hoping eBooks be as professional and efficient as it should be, but unfortunately it drifted away from that path. I still have hope that they can fix it and improve it significantly, soon.

The previous reviews sum it up. When I first got eBooks a few years ago, it was great. It has beautiful presentation of books with images and videos. However, there is now many problems. When you click on a picture, it takes you back to the beginning of a section, instead of where you left off. The videos must be scrolled through the entire library instead of clicking in from the contents. On my Ipad sometimes I can’t even click into the images. I paid over 300 dollars for a medical textbook that is difficult to use. I could have gotten it cheaper on IBooks or Kindle. What a horrible company Inking has become! I have emailed support several times and there response is to delete eBooks and reload it - which I have already done many times.

Just a few days into using eBooks and I’m already frustrated! First, the page scrolling is atrocious. Sometimes when you get to the bottom of the section it loads the next section fine, other times you have to drag the page 2 or 3 times before it works. I’ve also noticed the when you open up eBooks it defaults to putting you at the top of the page. When you have to scroll through several textbook pages of text to get to a later section this becomes incredibly inconvenient.

I like having eBooks to access my various medical book titles in one place on my phone, but the navigation really needs some work. If I tap on any one of the titles, I get taken to a menu where I can download chapters. But that’s the only option I have is to download chapters. If I decide I do not want to download chapters, there’s nothing else I can do on that page.
I can’t just view a chapter without downloading it, and worst, I cannot go back to the homepage. I have to exit eBooks completely and restart it to be able to look at other titles. You guys need to fix that.

I have bulky textbooks that could only be read on a table, etc. and eBooks makes them very easy to read. Maintaining notes is a great plus as is searching through the books. There is also room for improvement: following a link to a table or diagram and hitting the back button takes the reader to the beginning of the chapter rather than the point of entry into the table/diagram. It would be best if eBooks would remember where you were before following a link. Also, subheadings in chapters take you to the wrong place in the chapter.

If you e used iBooks or kindle and enjoyed their intuitive interface and functionality, you will not find this here. I’ve clicked page links on accident and instead of a back button or a swipe down to previous content, you must scroll all the way back. Think of going from chapter one to chapter eight and not being able to return to chapter one unless you scroll back (iPad Pro example). Trying to highlight is annoying as it brings up the system menu to copy and share at times and is only available on a single sentence at a time.

Read on your desktop or even in your mobile/tablet browser instead.

Not practical for actual studies. Horrid search function that will not take to full phrases or combined words. Slow to scroll. Very poor user interface for fast functionality. It was a good idea but will take more than minor bug improvements to make this product work.
Try this: find a section in your book that has a set of three words together. It will search for one word in the phrase—even if you select all three words. And sometimes won’t go to any of those three words. And there is no way to search a certain chapter, instead of searching the whole book. Some of us have textbooks. 2000 pages is not searchable if you can’t pre-select the chapter or pages you want to search.
No good for students.
I don’t understand why this is out of beta phase yet.

Why 2 stars at all? I sent an email and got a reply, which offered no solution, nonetheless I appreciated it.

Please make this functional because for some this app we have no option NOT to select this as the reading app.

eBooks is decent, but the fact that you have to click and drag to highlight and write notes, instead of just being able to work with a stylus (Apple Pencil, etc) irks me. It could be used much more efficiently. I really hope that the developer actually reads these reviews.
Positives: Haven’t ran into any problems with eBooks crashing, and pictures are very clear.
Overall: 2.5/5 until they fix the aforementioned bugs that others are talking about, and update the software to have functionality with Apple Pencil.

Can’t change font size. Can’t optimize anything. Can’t delete titles I accidentally dowloaded as trials. Despite that I have bought over 1500$ worth books, even free apps provide all these small configurations. Very disappointed with such a multi-million dollar to not spend few bucks on small changes that could improve user experience. Above all zero regards to poor reviews and absolute lack of introspection.

I use this mainly for radiology books. The images are fantastic, though the file sizes are very large, often 1gb or more for a big text.
However, trying to just read a chapter is a horrible experience. For a book that is fully downloaded, there is a lag and necessity for multiple clicks each time you want to look at an image.
For that reason I look for content in other applications whenever possible.
Please fix eBooks!

eBooks on the surface looks good-it’s relatively sleek, has downloadable books, and syncs with the web version. Then, yup actually use it and discover how buggy the whole thing is. The worse is how picture captions are not fully displayed, forcing you to click into a separate page to view the picture and caption but once you click back, it takes you all the way to the start of the section, forcing you to scroll all the way down to where you were.

As if that’s not bad enough, the whole section scroll thing is horrid. When you want to jump to the mid part of section, the scroll bar works, but once you scroll on the page, it jumps back to the start of the section again.

Then, hilighting doesn’t fully workout behaves unexpectedly, and more.

I wrote their support about these basic functionality issues, but they just basically ignored it. Let’s pressure inkling to actually solve these problems.

eBooks is very useful! The formatting is well done making it easy to navigate throughout each text book. I also appreciate the ability to highlight and review these highlights later.

My only gripe is that the text size is a bit small and is it adjustable. It would greatly improve the user experience to have the ability to adjust the text size and make reading more comfortable. Kindle already does this effectively.

This is useless. You cannot highlight or write notes as you read on the digital text. You hav to pull out the notes and bookmarks to type (!) something. Seriously why can’t it work like a PDF document where you can leave notes on the text as you read. This is a waste. Truly. Maybe is good for a recipe book but not a textbook. At least let us download the pdf and I can work on it using Acrobat for iPad. FYI your software designers are aware of the Apple Pencil both first and second generation. If not they should so we can make use of it.

Good:
- beautifully displayed
- all my textbooks at my finger tips
- easily search and retrieved information
- better than Kindle app

Bad:
- app does not allow for screen rotation; unable to view entire tables on single screen due; please enable screen rotation
- auto-scrolls back to top of section instead of going to desired location
- when switching between books, I have to manually back out several clicks before I get back to main menu. It’s tedious since I use eBooks practically everyday and switch amid all my texts.

Overall, eBooks could be better. As a practicing PA-C, I use it everyday. I definitely used it quite a bit in PA school as well. I can’t recommend this product to other colleagues/students until more bugs and user requests are addressed.

While doing review questions, if I click on an image, the quiz doesn’t bookmark at the current question and returns me to start of the quiz every time I see an image associated with a question. Many others have pointed out the same thing . Please fix it in your update. It’s a really important feature. Everything else is great with eBooks .

The book text, images, layout are high quality. However eBooks seems to lack basic navigation. When I bookmark it puts me at beginning of bookmarked chapter. Each time you want to go back to your page you either scroll through entire chapter to have to try to do a word search to get back to where you are.

Zero features. Sluggish as hell. Doesn’t play nice with Apple Pencil, which it just sees as a finger. Highlighting on my iPad doesn’t seem to work. Should have smaller fonts available in the era of retina displays. Should be better annotation tools that are easy to use. Don’t think their developers have actually spoken to anyone who uses inkling for textbook reading and annotation, otherwise they’d realize how annoying the system is. Wish I could find a way to transfer the books to another app.

Makes my surgical textbooks light but need to make highlighting easier. There is no reason to pick up and move a single word and the program should recognize this as a highlight instead! Need to make the captions below images easier to access without being taken to the beginning of the chapter once you return to text.

The iPhone X has been out for a while and there is still no update for eBooks.

Additionally, the bug that automatically scrolls to the top of a section when returning from looking at a photo is still here. This makes reading medical textbooks horrendously painful. Imagine a book skipping 50 pages earlier every time you read a picture caption.

I contacted support and they said that their engineers are “aware of the problem” but that “there is no ETA for a fix at this time.” Fantastic.

Just wanted to let people know that I have been reading a medical textbook on the iphone8 and haven't had the whole "click on a picture and scroll up to the top of the chapter" problem. You can get back to exactly where you were with a swipe of the finger.

One of my textbooks has several videos included. The current version of eBooks can play the shorter ones that are only a minute or two long but the ones that are 10-20 minutes just sit there and say they are loading and never play. I have tried deleting the book and redownloading it to no effect.

Books are rendered as text with all images listed with reference numbers. The numbers are unclickable which means you have to sort through dozens of images to find the correct one referenced to the text.

For radiology texts this is a joke. I have radiology texts on Kindle and the implementation of images is MUCH better. It’s so bad I’m contemplating buying the kindle version of the hardcopy books I already own and can only use inkling to access.

Just echoing multiple reviews. App is frustrating and early impossible to use for learning. Cannot see all the text of a caption until you click on the image. When you do, you see the full image and then when you go back, you are at the start of the chapter! Cannot put into words how irritating this is. I would discourage any publisher from using eBooks as a solution for econtent until this addressed, which is several years running now.