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I wanted to support independent bookstores so I got this app to read American Dirt for my book club. The only favorable thing I can say is that the text is mostly legible. So I will resist the urge to purchase a Kindle version and persevere to the end. Where do I start with its failings? The table of contents, font and bookmark tabs don’t appear half the time when I tap the top of the page to open them up. The bookmark feature worked once I was able to find it, but after a few days lapse from reading, all my bookmarks have disappeared. I read on my IPad, but when I tried the same app on my phone, I had to scroll from page one to find my place. The text has many typos and weird spacing errors, especially with possessive words and apostrophes. There’s no way to highlight passages or look up words. After this experience, I’m sorry to say I’m returning to my Kindle. This app needs lots of work before I’ll use it again.

I use this app because I want to be able to support independent booksellers but I find that I rarely touch the ebooks I have downloaded because this app’s interface is so slow, unresponsive, and devoid of useful features. I read a lot of nonfiction and academic texts, for which it would be useful to annotate within the app. This is not possible beyond simple highlighting and bookmarking (and the highlighting function barely works—it’s as if the app doesn’t recognize touch inputs on the screen or does so in a very delayed way). Most books, no matter what settings I apply, also have irregularities in the layout—odd character or word spacing, unnatural page or paragraph breaks, etc. I would not recommend this app to anyone who has reading or visual processing challenges. The dysfunction in the app and the lack of user settings options make make it virtually inaccessible.

I really want to support independent bookstores, but this ebook app barely functions. You can only bookmark pages, not specific lines of text. You can’t remove bookmarks from the bookmarks side bar. The TOC doesn’t have chapters, only sections. Once I open the TOC or bookmarks, I can close out of them. I’m going to try and stick it out on principle, but if I want to actually enjoy reading the ebooks I read, I might end up back with a big company like Google Play or Kindle for my eBooks just because this app is such a miserable experience to use. If you really want to incentivize people to support indie bookstores, you need make sure the proprietary app you’re forcing people to use is robust and supports the basic functions users are going to need (like navigating to chapters from the table of contents) or allow users to read their ebooks in other apps.