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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?

This app absolutely ruins the one great thing about ebooks: the ability to instantly search through them and find what you want. Oh sure you can search in this app but it’s just awful. For instance if you search for a two-worded phrase it will give you every single instance of both the words, which is less than helpful. There doesn’t appear to be any way to search for a phrase at all. The fact that this is geared toward text books and people who are going to need to search through the text on the regular is just ridiculous. The flash cards are a nice addition, though you’re severely limited in how you can format them. For whatever reason they only allow you one line to work with and you can’t space down to create a larger card. Everywhere throughout the app it claims you can hover over any diagram or sketch and add it to a flash card. I have yet to have that work. Then, say you messed up a flash card, editing them is a nightmare. I have 40 flash cards for one unit but when I hover over the one I want to edit I get nothing. No option to edit it. My option is to delete and start over. It’s a shame the publishers force people to use an app this bad for their product.

Don’t bother skimming or flipping quickly through the content to find your highlights or anything useful… scrolling is slow and choppy, which is utterly amazing considering its a textbook viewing app. Seriously, every app I’ve ever used has scrolled more smoothly than this one and virtually none of those have been intended for doing reading. Aside from rendering the actual text on-screen, I can’t think of anything more important—and this app fails at it. Additionally, the Appendix A where answers to in-text questions are supposed to be is missing chapters 10-50. How does that even happen? With an utter lack of quality checking, care for the user experience, or incentive to actually produce a quality product I suspect. When universities are literally funelling every student to your doorstep and alternatives are scarce to nonexistent, it doesn’t leave much incentive to build something worthwhile, does it?