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Using Cengage’s e-reader, and accessing the associated “MindTap” materials is infuriating. It doesn’t have to be this way. Cengage: if you’re going to create an educational ecosystem and charge and arm and a leg for it, you better actually provide a decent product. This is unfortunately the worst experience I’ve had with an “eBook” to date. Their servers can’t handle the number of students using the service and recently had a massively inconvenient outage. Bookmarks and highlighted passages mysteriously vanish from the app, something that’s unforgivable when I’m trying to research. There’s no obvious way to identify page numbers or paragraph locations, so citing the book as a resource is almost impossible. The UI is unresponsive and occasionally crashes. I got prompted for the app to track my location—why would you need that, Cengage?! I’m taking every possible opportunity to complain about your terrible products. Let me buy the book as a PDF, load it in Acrobat, and stop wasting your engineering resources on gatekeeping knowledge. Your priorities are out of alignment with what students and teachers need, and I hope your shareholders are as ticked off as your users are. I don’t want your MindTap features, I don’t want your “flash cards,” I don’t want your app. Let me learn MY way and stop wasting resources in the pursuit of control. Put it on Kindle, give it to Openstax, let buyers get a PDF, I don’t care. Just stop this.

I am super disappointed with this app and content itself! Firstly, the whole thing that classes in colleges require students to buy this material, is outrageous! Students are forced to buy this online books ,but not only books, also the assignments included, which adds to the price! Well, ok, I guess that is the reality we live in , and we buy this books with fool access to not only book, but to the assignments as well, but apparently the access is only for 4 months!! So, it’s not even purchase, it’ s a rental!!!! Then, when you open the class , and read the book, the book is not formatted even! Grammar is not followed whatsoever! Hi can not even read and understand the text because of this poorly- poorly made material! I don’t even bring to the attention, that if this company- Cengage forcing colleges to switch to paperless books and provide the access online, supposedly, we live in digital time these days, but their app Cengage doesn’t even support the assignments on the iPad!!! So, what is point?! Why do i even bother to download the app, if this app doesn’t support any activity provided by the course! Very disappointed! Just because of this reason, i search for classes where material is not tight to this company in any way! Horrible experience!

So I assume that an app made for mobile devices will make reading a text book on said device much easier than trying to use browser controls. The problem I ran into is that I cannot log in to the app at all, I guess because all my courses are concave through blackboard. It’s absolutely absurd that I can take 10+ classes using cengage, but if I want to read on my phone I have to make a new account and pay for something I’ve already paid for. If there is a way to log in using my blackboard credentials then spending a half hour searching forums and the cengage support page should have uncovered something. This app is nothing but a money grab!!! If this is representative of the company’s value system then cengage needs to be replaced by a company that cares about the education of the students they supply! After reading other reviews it seems I’m lucky that I couldn’t log in to see the disaster that the app really is.