Cengage Mobile Reviews

Using this app’s e-reader, and accessing the associated “MindTap” materials is infuriating. It doesn’t have to be this way. this app: 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 Cengage , 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 Cengage to track my location—why would you need that, this app?! 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 Cengage 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- this app forcing colleges to switch to paperless books and provide the access online, supposedly, we live in digital time these days, but their app this app doesn’t even support the assignments on the iPad!!! So, what is point?! Why do i even bother to download Cengage , if Cengage 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!

This is so so close to being somewhat useful. It’s almost reasonable to take Cengage and use it in a pinch (like studying on a plane or something), but it’s just not quite worth it. I downloaded Cengage on my phone to use the audiobook feature while I drive or travel, but the player is absolute garbage. The voice is choppy and difficult to understand if you’re not reading along, and you can’t even change it to a better voice. You can’t pick a spot to start reading, just like the website reader, but this doesn’t even have a scrub bar! There isn’t even that terrible feature where the reader starts at the top of your screen, it starts at the beginning of THE CHAPTER. You can’t rewind and you can’t jump to a different section. To their credit, you can at least set the reading speed to 2x, but that just makes everything less understandable.

I also like the search feature, it’s pretty nifty. Really my only complaint is the absolute garbage reader.

I haven’t been using Cengage for a long time but some things I’ve noticed that can be improved upon are the following:
Syncing highlighted or bookmarked text in books across devices that are logged in on the same account. If I want to read and highlight information on my phone, it would be nice if it showed on my iPad.
Being able to do quizzes on my iPad or iPhone would most helpful. At minimum the iPad because if I’m on the go and need to get work I can’t just log into a laptop I don’t have.
The same could be said about study cards. If I want extra study time on the go being able to pull the flash cards my phone or iPad would be nice and helpful.
I haven’t played around with the auto reader too much but the little bit I did, it sounds bad.

Cengage can do a few minor things pretty well - read the ebook, view grades, do flash cards, and see upcoming assignments (I’ve never needed assignments or polls). Some of these are not very useful considering most people have the due dates in a calendar and know the grade for each assignment because they see it when they turn them in. Flash cards are a decent feature, and reading the book is ok with decent accessibility features like font sizing and aural reading (although the robot voice is not very pleasing to the ear).

However, there is so much more potential here to use an iPad as a educational tool. Apple Pencil could easily be used in the book to highlight and scribble notes in the margins on an iPad, and have it sync between logins/devices. I also feel like viewing lesson videos could be easily implemented. These two things alone would make this a nice supplemental tool.

I decided to write a review because I feel l need to help defend Cengage. Maybe it’s because I downloaded it with extremely low expectations that I was more than pleased with how it turned out to be.

I downloaded it for one purpose: to read my textbook offline and in a dedicated app. Based on another review, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to. I normally access my book through a link in my Canvas course, and I was afraid it wouldn’t show up when I logged in with the personal email address I used to create a this app account with at some point. However, it showed up in my “Books” and gave me the option to download, which I did.

I had no expectations of being able to multitask by having pages side by side. I don’t know how anyone could do that on an iPhone screen anyway.

As far as the textbook layout, it’s a little different from the browser version, but I don’t find it difficult to use. It’s more like a normal textbook with multiple pages in a section instead of one long screen you scroll through for each section.

Anyway, if you just want an app to read your textbook with, here you go.

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 Cengage at all, I guess because all my courses are concave through blackboard. It’s absolutely absurd that I can take 10+ classes using this app, 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 this app support page should have uncovered something. Cengage is nothing but a money grab!!! If this is representative of the company’s value system then this app 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 Cengage really is.

If you are a professor, find another application/text combination.

If you are a student considering taking a class that utilizes this material, don’t.

The actual “app” is useless. Most exercises must be done in a browser. Browser access is awkward and not user friendly.

The menu is meant to guide you through text with videos, exercises and quizzes to supplement material, which would be great in theory if actually executed properly. The reality is that the text is segmented and difficult to scroll through.

Charts are cut off from vision with no easy way to scroll down. Expanding charts pop up in a narrow half screen that can’t be expanded, so you have to scroll back and forth in the narrow little screen to read them. So much for visual aid.

Assignments missing in main menu that show up as a zero in grade book.

“Memory aid” videos are annoying and create elaborate confusing scenarios for “learning” some terms that I actually already know from other classes.

The developers of this program should take a look at studies on learning in electronic apps, specifically pertaining to the concentration loss that results from having to jump back and forth in screens and find where you left off.

If I could give this zero stars, I would.

If it wasn’t too late to drop the class, and if doing so wouldn’t affect my financial aid, I would.

For context I am using Cengage on an iPad so one of the main functions I’d like to use is the reading the eBook. The ebook doesn’t have good resizing meaning if you’re using Cengage side by side you can’t zoom out - it simply resets the text. And even worse, sometimes the book is not available. So I’m at my wits end and must use the website. If there’s going to be a vertical integration ie they make the book, website, and app, one would expect a better experience given they are licensing the material. They aren’t running a charity. Make it work. Having STEM courses and ineffective technology, the irony is not lost. Nothing worse than trying to access Computer Science material and the tech won’t cooperate.

I’m used to a different reading textbook app/online tool for my schoolwork. Cengage was very hard to use at first until I just kept playing around because I was curious of how I was going to be able to complete my reading assignments and the activity work. This is ok, just slide your finger down to get to the bottom of the page and go on, it can Read for you and highlight which I like. I just wish that I was able to do the activity work on my phone as well. I don’t see a way to notify when an assignment would be due a few days before, that would be very useful as well if the feature isn’t present already, it is a bit adventuring to get around to understanding the gist of how Cengage works.

I was using Cengage for reading my text book and Cengage stopped working. I deleted then reinstalled Cengage but Cengage stopped granting me access to the book. I can still view the book through the website, just not Cengage . I went to customer support chat on the website. I entered my name and email then was directed to an agent who also wanted my name and email. That agent directed me to technical support. My browser refreshed and I started the process over again. When I was directed to technical support a second time, I waited in a queue for 15 minutes before I was given the response “no agents currently available.” I started the process over again. Now I’m waiting in another queue. I should be studying instead of dealing with this. For the amount of money I pay for these materials you’d expect Cengage to just work.

So I thought it would be more convenient to use Cengage instead of Safari or chrome because I constantly have to re-log in. However, Cengage presents itself with no multitasking features. I can have safari and my pdf-editor open side-by-side with the iPad pro’s multitasking features - however, Cengage must be open full screen or not at all. Very disappointing. I see no reason for this other than lazy developers. I now have to go through Safari to open my textbooks each time instead. Fix this and I honestly would go up 2 stars. Fix some other annoying things - like adding page numbers (I know this is a problem on the website version, not sure about Cengage ).

Update// I tried using Cengage , I CANT EVEN SCROLL THROUGH A CHAPTER IN THE EBOOK. Basically unusable. So sad.

I have not had the same issues as the other reviewers (knock on wood)... I’m able to read my textbook on my phone and have it read to me. Cengage still needs some MAJOR improvements. Especially since the textbooks are so expensive. It’s unacceptable... this app needs to take the responsibility of making Cengage better for students. There is no excuse. I’m giving Cengage 3 stars because it’s function for me... BUT there is one huge problem I’ve faced... Cengage doesn’t save highlights and pages to my account. So, when I go on my computer, the pages I saved on my phone and the areas I highlighted to not reflect on the this app website. This is really disappointing and should be changed.

I’ve used some pretty terrible apps prior to this but this app takes the cake. The mobile books are a joke and are virtually unreadable. The graphics that go along with the book are just as easy to read as they are on desktop. (Complete garbage). this app should take some of the $120 they over charge for unlimited in order to profit off students and hire a real app developer. This thing is a complete joke. Thanks for the highlight feature but it’s no use if the book doesn’t load!

Edit: the pages displayed with texts boxes are atrocious. I can’t read then because they’re split into syllabic sentences that are 70 lines long to cover two sentences. Cengage is a joke just like this company. If you’re going to offer students books on mobile, make sure you test the version before putting it out.

Apostrophe’s and other symbols are turned into a garbled mess, making it extremely difficult to work through a programming course. Inability to resize font is detrimental to eyesight and makes it hard to read. Strange cutoffs and formatting causes entire paragraphs to go missing in between pages until you restart Cengage . Load times between pages are ridiculous, and I’m on a brand new iPad. Some books are 10+ years out of date and contain wrong information - these are IT courses, they need to be more current! The on screen reader voice is robotic. There are far better AI voice readers out there that do not sound like crap. Use one or get some voice talent.

This is basic stuff for a reading application. Won’t even get into how you can’t do your activities in Cengage . Fix it.

Even though the reviews for Cengage are bad, I don’t think it’s too bad. Just like another reviewer, I just downloaded it so that I can read my book when I’m traveling or don’t have access to a computer. It does the job, theres a table of contents to see each individual chapter and section, you can highlight text, and when clicking on an underlined word, it brings up the definition. I haven’t looked at the other features of Cengage but if you want to download it for the sole purpose of reading the textbook then it’s a good app!

I have never been happy with this app as a website. It is an unnecessary tool that lazy teachers use to “teach” their classes. They basically make you pay for a unique digital access platform, which is just a virtual machine, which anyone can install on their PC with any copy of any OS they want for free. Cengage though, since I a still be forced to use this app the site, is better than I thought it would be. The site is very difficult to navigate, it runs incredibly slow and the layout makes no sense, but Cengage is simpler, just what it needs to be. I’ll update if I run into problems.

It almost works. Almost. Everything about Cengage hurts so much it’s close to working. So, so close. The sidebar has a drop down for your courses... which displays nothing when interacted with. The UI is generally well organized, but unreactive. The eBook reader is a great idea, however using vertical scrolling instead of flipping pages makes it painful to try to use. Most of the time you can’t even scroll. At all. Maybe try using the built in page scrolling to actually scroll pages and use the vertical scroll for skipping chapters? Or maybe change the ToC to a drop down menu and remove the vertical scroll? It could work so well... if only it worked.

This most recent update made Cengage unusable. The text formatting is all sorts of messed up. The default format is beyond tiny. If you increase the font size, you increase the leading (the space between lines). So in order for me to have the font at a normal size I can read, I end up with 1/4 of the info per page.
This has also messed up how images and charts are displayed, making them even smaller, forcing my to pinch to zoom in. But if you zoom in or out, you can no longer turn the page?
It’s just... bad.
I am so angry as I primarily read my text in my phone and now Cengage is unusable.
Please please fix it.

Plenty of bugs, weird layouts, and just strange decisions that went into the making of Cengage. Best part, is that this is from a for profit group. They want to make major buck on you, and understand that they don't need to be accessible on all platforms in order to get you to buy their wonderful services. So although there is all that, there really is nothing else that is any better. Thank you for the product! Can I add more to my shopping cart?!

Update: I used Speak Screen all the time to listen to my chapters in the car or on the go. After IOS 12 update, speak screen will not load anymore for MindTap. Now I have to sit at PC in order to listen. Speak Screen works just fine on all my other apps tho. Also Cengage doesn't sync with the desktop version so when you open Cengage to finish reading on the go, you tap on the chapter but it opens another chapter entirely so you have to search through all the pages to find where you left off. It just keeps getting better!!

Don't download. Read the reviews. You can't do assignments, can't even read the textbook because the ereader is not functional with any version of iOS. I have an iPhone 7 plus and an iPad Pro 10.5 and Cengage doesn't work on either device. Thousands of dollars go to this app for books and the students can't even use Cengage that professors FORCE them to use. And this app's responses in the reviews are just years of apologies but no fixes. Shame on you this app. Students: Do yourself a favor and get Chegg.

Update: Their response below is to contact support but it's the same prob that all iOS users have reported for years with the e-reader: white screen while attempting to open the book. And no assessment compatibility is ridiculous in 2018. No thanks, this app. I'm not wasting more of my limited time with support.

I am an avid note taker and use many different publishers on split screen to take notes with my Apple Pencil. If you have to do this with Cengage I feel your pain. Every time you exit Cengage , wether to grab a title from your design app or look up an image online Cengage resets to some random page and won’t keep your place at all. The split screen functionality is garbage. If you don’t position the screens just right you’ll be looking at three pages at once all weirdly columned out instead of legibility ordered. What makes it the worst is that it doesn’t keep track of page numbers so a chapter is so long that once you do navigate away from you spot (which is an obvious inevitability the designers should be considering) you then have to scroll and scroll and scroll to re-find your place. Yes you can use the bookmarks to speed that up but only if you first hit the chapter then hit the section you’re on. Really? Taking notes is tedious enough, you would think that a company that specializes in education would take their target market into more consideration. I will be passing on my grievances to the school for making us purchase this overpriced ill considered excuse for an e-reader.

I’ve used Cengage for two semesters now, it’s not mandatory but is provided this semester. It’s easy to navigate compared to similar products like Pearson’s Mylab, WileyPlus, etc which aren’t even worth installing. I like the ability to easily highlight and then review only highlighted material. Much more practical then highlighting a textbook or notes, bonus I can still use the textbook and resell it as “like new”. I haven’t used it yet but in the past the reading to you function was great. I can’t read my law 201 textbook for long before getting bored and trailing off so it’s a useful source.

I do have a problem with the random load times for sections of the text. It’s always been buggy and either sometimes won’t load at all, or just requires you exact Cengage and reopen it. Sometimes it will be there ready to use, other times I have to try it again, even then it can take several minutes to load up. Other then that I’d give it 5 stars.

Cengage offers a great way to learn. I love the Mastery, the Chapters, the Practice Problems, the Problem Sets, and the Practice Exams. My only issue is that it isn’t fully compatible with mobile devices or iPads. I cannot complete my problem sets using my smartphone or iPad, which poses a problem seeing as I do not have a PC or a Mac. Also, using some PC’s, I’ve had issues with being able to submit precise answers. For example, in trying to correctly create a histogram or bar graph in Chapter 2 of Statistics, it did not offer me the ability to place the the bar exactly where I wanted, but instead gave one value below and one value above. I wanted to graph a frequency of .16, but could only place it at .15 or .17. This is an issue considering I was being graded on this problem set. I’m unsure if it is a sensitivity issue or if the program just doesn’t work well with certain devices.

The ebook experience is just the worst. Cengage “loads” the chapter you are on, but if you swipe left or right if attempts to “load”
the next section/chapter and you lose what you were just working on. Extremely frustrating attempting to go from the lesson and exercise question for math. Try to page through the exercises, sure there are answers but no steps so you can’t actually learn if you aren’t sure what to do in a specific situation. So you try to go back a few pages to the lesson... which has to load. Honesty, Cengage is a waste of time and energy in its current state. Most of the problems could be fixed with a decent “find” ability because then I could snap to what I wanted to see rather than dealing with laggy and slow loading screen roulette. Which section did you swipe to? Not the one you wanted, guess you can wait another 2 minutes to load what is hopefully the right section!

I was ok the first couple of chapters- sort of*. But got to my 3rd chapter and tables aren’t displaying on my iPad. Really? Who wants to read a book on the computer? Or have to log in through a browser- what’s the point of Cengage , then? I’d like the ability to take the downloaded book on the go/to work without having to connect to read a dang ebook.

*I despise the scrolling chapter. It’s not page by page but one long scroll. You can’t bookmark where you left off - it just creates a bookmark on the chapter so I have to scroll through to find where I left off.

Also, the header pop up while I’m reading is annoying. And don’t even bother trying to do assignments- they don’t work on Cengage . Which is fine - it’s a programming class and I expected to have to use the computer for assignments. So just leave them off Cengage if they don’t work.

When Cengage works its okay. But most of time Cengage is super slow and hard to navigate. I have also had Cengage randomly close in the middle of doing a project, which is SUPER frustrating. I have updated my IPad Pro so everything is current so i know that my IPad is not the problem. When you open Cengage it shows you the next due projects, ( some would say this feature is nice, however, i find that it is more of a pain than anything). If you are wanting to do anything on Cengage besides the next due project you have to navigate back to the home page. WHY CANT YOU JUST START OUT ON THE HOME PAGE AND HAVE A SIDE-BAR WITH NEXT DUE PROJECTS!!!! I end up using the desktop website because it is more user friendly. Fix the home page and the crashing problems and I’ll give it another try, but until then, I’ll stick with the full blown website.

I enjoy working out while listening to audio books, like most college students I’m extremely pressed for time so like to multi task when I can. The mobile app is super convenient for reading books on the go, though I wish when reading the audio books aloud it would stop narrating the picture captions 🤦🏼‍♀️ Talk about a headache hearing that, and not to mention it’s basically just a repetitive summary over the paragraph which makes you lose focus and I dread to hear the year and illustrator or the picture caption spoken aloud! Besides that Cengage is fine and works great, eventually hope you guys add the ability to take mindtap quizzes but that part isn’t so much important to me.

I have used several online books for school at this point. It seems that everyone is going in this direction. I like to use the reader (the voice who reads it to you) in the morning while I am getting ready. I am very busy so this helps me to read all that I need too that week. This part has been awful. Very choppy. Doesn’t finish sentences. It seems to skip around. Very annoying.

Also if I highlight a word/selection on the laptop it does not transfer to Cengage .

Other than that, it’s okay. I am only in Chapter two so I don’t know what the rest of the book will be like. I DO LIKE the word review on each chapter. I thought that was very nice.

I was thrilled to discover that you can now listen to books, but it turns out that it doesn’t work as advertised. First, the robot voice that constantly has to say ever punctuation like “parentheses, end parentheses” is really obnoxious. Second, the audio feature in their app won’t even function properly. It will read the chapter title and not continue with the actual chapter. There seems to be no user friendly way to prompt the reader to start at a specific word or sentence. Support couldn’t troubleshoot it, so they told me to use the website itself and not Cengage . This works, but it lacks some of the features on Cengage like speeding up the reader. Overall I’m pretty dissatisfied, specifically with the audiobook features.

I ended up renting the book for the semester because it is very hard to use the ebook. You have to scroll all the way to the sub-chapter you want because the table of contents doesn’t have hyperlinks. The page number also doesn’t show so if your professor decides to give you a page to do as homework, you’ll have to know which specific chapter it belongs to. Cengage itself is very slow too. If your iPad goes on sleep the ebook sort refreshes so you’ll have to scroll to the chapter you like again. I ended up bookmarking everything because it’s such a pain to scroll through everything all over again. Also doesn’t let you search the page you want. I have a calculus book so if you search for a number, different numbers on different pages will appear.

Let’s just say it for what it is. Kindle, Nook, have got the technological part down as far as cross platform access. The fact you can’t make notes and highlights available if you go from device to another is head scratching. Exporting notes and the highlighted is not possible. This limitation places a constraint on how we can organize and review them. Most of all, the purpose of going through a paperless, digital format allows for portability, Cengage imposes its limitation. I use an iPad Pro and it is NOT fully functional as it would be on a laptop/PC. I can’t do the assignments on it (states the function is not available for Cengage ). Bottom line, the textbook industry has been getting over for a very long time and the revenue is too high to make any excuses. I don’t need any excuses. Just do what’s right and make it happen!

I’ve read a lot of the negative comments and for me Cengage does what I need it to. Allows me to get notifications and it can read the textbook to you while you drive or just in general. Can search the text to find specific topics within the chapters. Only downside is that Cengage does not let you do the course work. But that may be asking too much. Doing it on the laptop is just fine and using my phone to search the textbook while I work on the laptop works perfectly and saves time. Very useful app just glad it even exists.

I like reading my college material on the go. I was using Cengage for places I didn’t want to drag my computer or places that didn’t have WiFi (I got cellular data). Cengage started out great. I could read at the Doctors office in the waiting room or at a relatives house. Now, it has told me that they are updating the mobile app. I won’t be able to access my book during this time. I waited & waited. It has been a month & apparently they haven’t fixed anything. I have to stay at home or go to McDonalds & read off my computer now. I feel like it is a bit ridiculous especially considering I paid like 40$ to rent the book from this app.

I must say Cengage has improved since I started using it two years ago. I am able to move between mobile and desktop and more or less pick up where I left off. It currently makes sense to try and use one app or the other as much as possible however, if you are like me (which a majority of college students are) and primarily use the mobile app, then you are hamstrung because you end up having to use the full desktop app to complete assignments. this app needs to completely commit to the mobile experience as that’s the direction the market is moving and they will do much better.