Cengage Read Reviews

by Aaron Backlund

Cengage Read is missing many of the features that I used to help study and better interact with my courses. The new app has many bugs that need to be ironed out I frequently get kicked out of CengageRead and are forced to login again. The previous app would not do this and always retained my session/login allowing me to quickly get going. Plus not being able to see upcoming due dates it a complete deal breaker. Sometimes I don’t always have a computer with me to login but I always have my phone and not having that is tuff. I don’t always nor want to have a laptop near me just to check upcoming assignments. Even parts of the reading program don’t display correctly. Having parts of the textbook navigation getting in the way of the book. I hope these issues get ironed out or updated since I love having access to my Cengage on my mobile devices.

by School Girl Alley

CengageRead need a lot of help! There are no page numbers listed on the pages only if you go into the index of the book. This is very annoying seeing how I’m using the textbooks for school and am required to cite the page info. The pages also do not adjust and the text overlaps in some areas which makes it hard to read. It’s a hassle to get to the highlights and notes. And there is hardly any options for the text settings just to adjust the font size. It would be nice to scroll or use a darker setting when reading. This is one of the underdeveloped app that I have used for reading textbooks and wish they would choose a different one!

by Myfrustration818

Not only is CengageRead horrid, and the voice options terrible, but it reads the pages so poorly and out of order, any student trying to learn would lose track. It reads the page number, title, and text listed at the bottom of every page before it begins reading that page. Then it proceeds to read the second column on the page 1st and the first column on the page 2nd. Then it reads the captions underneath each of the images, followed by reading the text and title at the bottom of the page again. When you turn the page it repeat this process all over again reading the second call them first and the first column second.

by Razorwind124

If I could give this no stars I would. I don’t know how they managed to make a textbook reader so awful. How can you make a reading app awful you might ask? Well, it routinely just omits entire pages of charts. When it doesn’t do that, it often makes a habit of omitting important words. I was just attempting to read a chart that was supposed to give body systems in one column, and the autoimmune disorders and what they affect in the other. It gave the body systems, and it gave the body parts affected, but the part of the sentence that gave the NAME of the disorder was blanked out. How am I supposed to learn this way? I use CengageRead because my disability makes physical books difficult and painful to use. And my education is suffering as a result of CengageRead developers incompetence.

by Jingle Barrel

Cengage Read is such a poorly designed app that it reminds me of my 4th-grade “website” projects, which worked great until you tried to click anything on the page. Somehow, every possible function on CengageRead manages to have some sort of issue. Want to highlight a section of the text? Have fun trying to find it later when an entirely different section has become highlighted. That’s if you even can highlight anything on the page, because and touch of the screen to the far left or right side of the page will trigger a flip to the next page. CengageRead is simply straight out of the Stone Ages and I am only using it out of desperation. I would so much rather carry a ten-pound textbook all day long.

by Fridaklvr

I was already really hesitant to use CengageRead as I hate having to use anything outside of Apple Books or kindle. I tried using the spoken content on my iPad & iPhone to listen to the book because the voices they have on CengageRead are SOOOO robotic and hard to listen to. Tried using spoken content through my iPad and iPhone and neither read more than a page at once like how it usually can on other apps. So I thought I’d power through and use the read aloud within the Cengage app and it did the SAME thing. This is super counterproductive and forces me to start the player on every page. This is even more frustrating considering the layout of the book includes only a paragraph or so per page. Please fix this! This is super inaccessible for those who really need spoken content.

by Want Value

Zero stars if I could. It only have one job. Read their overpriced textbooks aloud. CengageRead changes voices every page, gets stuck, some of those voices are things like cello.

None of the voices are understandable they’re all AI generated crap or sound like they’ve just sucked a tank of helium, and at least four of them read in musical instrument - I kid you not. In this day and age they should be able to have a decent voice read those books. They could afford to pay somebody on Fiverr a few hundred bucks to record their stupid books. This is app is completely useless unless when the page turns you want to hear it read to you in violin. Just go with your regular app that comes with your phone. It will be 1000 times better. Cengage is a money making crap publisher and it’s unbelievable to me that anyone in education could perform this poorly. F-

by Morease

Like so many others I am required to use CengageRead it’s terrible. The books are never formatted correctly despite being Cengage published books. Whenever I open CengageRead it says “error”. I am not impressed with a lot of the content from Cengage and I feel frustrated that I am forced to use their products for my classes. It feels coercive and I really really don’t like it.

I have to pay for products I don’t like and wouldn’t use normally and their products have such low quality standards, but if you you have a captive customer base, I guess the quality isn’t the primary concern.

For books or documents Adobe acrobat & Apple Books can manage documents much better than this. I keep manuals for my car and major appliances in acrobat and have much more ease using and reading the documents. I have several ebooks (some free some paid) in Apple Books and that app also has a far better user experience than this!

by FFWest326

Given the push to a subscription textbook service where electronic access is the only way in which to access a book, I find it completely befuddling that the application for reading such electronic textbooks on both an iPad and iPhone is so deeply flawed on such a basic level.

The short story here is that the application cuts off the text at the “bottom” of the page. Need to use a larger font size? More text is cut off. This application has made the text virtually unreadable, in my opinion. I have no idea what other features are available in the application because I never even made it far enough past the first page before giving up entirely because the content was cut off.

To go a step further, I am an instructor who has used other textbook applications and never experienced such a fundamental issue before. Simply stated, I will not use Cengage products in my courses until this application error is corrected. If I could give zero stars, I would. This application is completely unsuited for its purpose.

by Old_Litehammer

Yes, this is a reader but not much more. It is a stripped down version of the previous app. You do not have a list of assignments due by date as previously. The MindTap tools are not available. You can read the book, underline, and develop notes in CengageRead which is not new as, once again, the previous app did. Cengage you emailed me and as asked me to recommend to my students. I cannot and will not. And to compound the problem, there is no choice for my students as you have removed the old app. Please consider debugging the need to sign in over and over. If I multitask with a different app, I am forced to sign in when I return.

by Ben_Forster

CengageRead was a good idea that had the worst execution I’ve witnessed. Instead of being able to scroll like you would with a normal online textbook the text is split up into pages that won’t even fit a whole table, and have barely any words on them.
What’s much worse is the voices. There’s literally one called bubbles that sounds like -you guessed it- bubbles, and is completely not understandable. Most of the voices used aren’t understandable, which is wild given that every other app I’ve used for narration was able to have an AI that you could understand easily. They made like 40 voices in the tiniest scroll bar that are all terrible and make my ears bleed.

by Xooxu

I honestly don’t know how it’s possible to have an ereader app this bad in 2023? It’s not a new or hard to master technology. The “pages” aren’t sized correctly to fit on the screen, and it’s possible to zoom out to show that it’s just a long canvas of different blocks that make up the “pages” but trying to scroll along to read will move you up and down. Turning your phone to try to fit two pages on the screen does god knows what but you end up with a totally blank screen that won’t change. A literal port of a continuous scroll web page would be a massive improvement over whatever they’re trying to do. Or just … a pdf of the book.

by Gavdzcg

I never write reviews for apps but this is truly the most frustrating app that I have ever used for reading. Were it not for the fact that I am required to use it for school, I would not use it.

No matter how I adjust the font or zoom, my text ALWAYS gets cut off. Sometimes if I am lucky, it’ll show the top of the page when I make the font as small as possible but it is usually short lived because CengageRead zooms in by itself. Given how expensive renting or buying from this company is, I had hoped they’d be able to produce an app that actually allows me to read the book. So frustrating and upsetting. Please do better Cengage.

by Justbarak

I'm exceedingly frustrated that Cengage discontinue access to the mobile app for ipad and gave us the ereader app which is completely non-functional. I'm in the middle of an MBA and I need to be able to read my textbooks.

The ipad app doesn't scroll text, it's glitchy, and the search function is nearly useless.

The ebooks, which require side swiping every section are a terrible way to read a book, vs the well-formatted digial books we had access to in the mobile app which scrolled for each chapter, were easy to highlight and navigate quickly.

User preferences aside, You don't just discontinue access to one app without working out the bugs on the new app! CengageRead literally has hundreds of 1-start reviews.

Please at least re-enable the mobile app till you sort out all the issue in the new one. I have a masters degree I need to complete.

My only option now is to read textbooks on my laptop browser or buy/rent the physical textbook.

by Fanfiction Enthusiast

Coming from bookshelf, my other textbook app, this isn’t even comparable. I only got this one because one class uses mindtap and I need to be able to read my textbook from my phone. Talk about a captive market.
CengageRead is so janky, the search function is unreliable, the layout is confusing and it’s overall not user friendly. Oh, also, my book randomly disappears sometimes and I have to sign out and re-sign in for it to reappear. It often crashes when this occurs.
If you can, use a different app for your textbook. And to the people running CengageRead, please try to improve it, there’s nowhere to go but up.

by Jmfrost

Great idea, but lacks in execution. Using on my iPad the progress bar in the bottom cuts off my view of the remainder of the page. I can’t seem to scroll up or down so I have no idea what’s below the bottom of the page. I can tell something is there because part of the text is cutoff behind the progress.

Adding a way to hide/auto hide the progress bar would make CengageRead far more useful. As an instructor I’m reluctant to use Cengage in the future if my students have to use the web version of the ebook. A large majority of my students use tablet or phones to read the book.

by Dhesketh

This is supposed to be an education app for reading online textbooks for college courses. There are like 20 voices that are impossible to listen to. Jester is just someone laughing. They sound like robots or people with helium or worse (if that’s even possible). I was really hoping to be able to listen to textbooks on the go but that won’t be happening. Edit: developer sent generic response asking for more info to solve the issue, wanting me to create account and ticket on website. I’m not going to do that. The issue is all the voices are terrible. There shouldn’t be “jester” and “robot” for reading college level textbooks.

by WannaBea3

CengageRead just crashed and when I opened it up again, it logged me out. This is frustrating because the original app didn’t do this. Like many on the reviews, I have to use CengageRead in order to read my textbook and I prefer to read it on my iPad rather than being stuck on my computer to read the textbook. So having it crash and having to relogin is inconvenient since I don’t have my login memorized. Besides crashing, it lags pretty badly, and sometimes it doesn’t show all the text. For certain tables, it doesn’t have the text in the first column. Please fix CengageRead developers.

by Dip Star 123666

I’m not one to post reviews, but this is so terrible that I had to leave a review. All forms of Cengage are horrific. I’m a college student who has had 3 classes that used Cengage as a primary form of education but it has been an awful experience every time. Registration pages rarely function. Any tests are extremely picky about what is the right answer. For a test on Excel, if you accidentally click a picture or a different button on the ribbon it will count it wrong even though you didn’t do anything. One of the worst educational experiences of my life

by Em Ily Mac Enchez

One would think after reading all the negative reviews about not being able to read the entire text on the screen that CengageRead developers would do something about it but I see they still have not fixed this problem. Pity we are at the mercy of our instructors and don’t have a choice in what textbook company we use because I certainly would not recommend one that doesn’t have a functional e-reader. Pretty sure they do this so we are forced to rent the textbook to have any options for reading when a full computer screen isn’t available.

by Dhshgsfabshsksu

I HATE CengageRead! I don't normally leave a review about an app for school but now I have to. I am being FORCED to use CengageRead because the ebook no longer shows on my iPad because it is considered a “mobile device”. I have been using my ebook on the website for a couple weeks but all of a sudden they want me to use their app! REALLY?! They say they care about our education BUT that was proven a LIE the moment I could no longer access my ebook online. If they cared about education they would let us use ebook on the website AND improved CengageRead already. I am so disappointed right now by this sudden change made by Cengage. This semester will be the last time I buy an access to ebook. I will no longer borrow or buy a book from them in the future.

by KailiS10

CengageRead is a complete joke. 100% worthless and unusable. I was excited about the audio book feature but that is so glitchy you can’t use it. On the rare occurrence it does work the voices are so robotic and choppy you can’t understand the words. How Cengage gets away with passing CengageRead off as a perk is beyond me. Students pay hundreds of dollars for these services and Cengage can’t even put out a functional app. Universities need to cut ties with Cengage asap. It’s unfair that students are required to pay to use garbage software that doesn’t work.

by Dan Manley

This weekend I was heading somewhere without internet. I was excited to learn that Cengage had an app I could download my e-text to so that I could study on my trip. Spoiler alert: Cengage ensures that isn’t possible. The problem is that CengageRead is the most abysmal excuse for an application I have ever seen. You cannot scroll down the pages, adjusting the font size causes the lines to overlap, and the voice narration is barely understandable. I myself am an app developer and I cannot believe any of this passed basic QA. Disappointed in this disgrace.

by MiKayla McGuire

Almost every time I try to highlight something, the book glitches and sends me to another page. Format and page numbering is set up weird. You don't get a full view of the page unless you zoom out every time you turn to a new page. I like that there is a section where you can view all pages you bookmarked. I've used McGraw Connect in a lot of my other courses and have never had these issues. Hopefully they put some effort into working out the bugs since a lot of teachers use cengage...

by Joxily

I've been using the application for about a month and waited to leave my review to fairly assess the functionality. CengageRead is trash. It doesn't even allow the text reading feature to read highlighted text, it just skips over highlighted text and resumes reading what's not highlighted, or sometimes the speech function doesn't even work. I updated CengageRead and couldn't even get past the terms and conditions popup. It asked me to decline or accept, I tapped accept and it didn't recognize it, only the decline and close option was recognized, which proceeds to sign you out. CengageRead needs better development and more testing, it's not good. I don't even want to install the next update because this most recent one was a pain.

by NightOwlette

I can see why the reviews on CengageRead is so low. I had to have a 7th edition book for my class and the cheapest rental I could find was on YOUR website. Good. Awesome. Let me just get it on my computer. Maybe I can pull up the cengage website on my phone so I could study while I go about my business.

Oh wait, I CAN’T! Because apparently I have to get CengageRead because I can’t access the book that I PAID FOR on a web browser! Okay, fine, let me just download CengageRead .

Lo and behold, I can’t even SEE THE ENTIRE PAGE because I have no idea how to clear out the bottom “go to this page” tab. I don’t even know if it’s capable of doing that. I have to pinch the screen to read the rest of the page. If you have a solution for me to see the full page I’m reading, maybe even find a way to format scrolling instead of the clunky swipe-to-next-section-of-the-page, that would be JUST SWELL. Thanks.

by Spunky702

Reader is slightly better than the website which is atrocious. Highlighting barely works in app though. Still can’t have a dictionary function. I love that it allows you to download to the book to use offline, but then requires you to log in to see it. Defeats the purpose if I can’t use it without internet.

Also, graphs, graphics, and chart are impossible to read. So tiny. They really show how much they care in their quality. They don’t.

Overall just meh. All these textbook websites are garbage and they know it. They don’t care to improve them. This one doesn’t even have a feedback option. Professors, stop using these terrible sites and make your own lessons.

by Cubixmind

I am only using CengageRead ebook reader, which allows me to read and highlight. I am not using this as an assignment course add on, so I can’t comment. CengageRead seems really buggy, it goes to another page, 2-4 pages from where you are at when either trying to highlight or if you simply happen to click on the wrong, word or letter. It does not automatically give you a full page view. Also for some reason it does not show the page number you are at unless you click on the menu.

by Megativecoefficents

CengageRead fails visually when shown images it’s not easy to follow along .. also sometimes it ready text in the page that are not needed to be read like copy write numbers and also page numbers like the one on the corner of images .. also it’s really hard to read on phone so i use mirroring from my phone to tv and on some books like for math it’s zoomed out and text can not be made bigger or smaller you have to zoom in but than it zoomed out automatically after each sentence.. my biggest issue is that the audio voices are also not that good I mean the selection of voices is bad to worse than to terrible .. it’s already hard to listen to a robotic monotone voice but you have darth vader as a option like why !!! I mean just a simple voice that sounds more human would be great also there are a lot of pronunciation issues .. and in general CengageRead isn’t bad but it has issue small issues that make it bad .. my choice for replying is because I like using CengageRead but it’s hard sometimes because the complications and small issues get to be time consuming and somewhat annoying to have to do (turning pages ) and sometimes not being able to skip the copyright information is weird also the extra i information like legal property rights .. and text sizing for math books and images .. many more improvements also but it’s not a bad app just has a lot of small issues

by Farkle Sparks

CengageRead will close out during use and then you’ll have to reopen it. It’ll do this 3 times in succession randomly while reading or trying to highlight/put notes. I could deal with that but my biggest gripe is that what you do on CengageRead does carry over to the website version. So if you read and highlight a book on CengageRead then save to synchronize everything and open up the Cengage website the book will pick up where you left off for the last page you were on in CengageRead BUT none of the pages you read and highlighted in CengageRead will show as been having highlighted on the website. It’s very inconvenient because sometimes I carry my iPad with me to read my textbooks and then when I am home I use my computer to complete assignments but I can’t do that when none of the stuff appears on the website as having been read and marked up.

by LaliPops

I was using this on and off to cram in some studying, reading, review etc., in between daily tasks, work, life, etc., when I didn’t have my computer handy to sit down and read online. It was ok until the latest iOS update. It was buggy, before, would crash and skip pages or not allow you to highlight, but I could read it. That was the important part. Now you cannot even view the content on the top and bottom of the pages and it won’t allow scrolling up or down to see this, it just skips to the next page. Please fix! It’s a great tool to use for busy students!

by LOVELAW1018

As you can see below I was very stressed about not having access to the text on my iPad. Well that was yesterday. I asked and I received. In one day! That is stellar service. If something isn’t right with Cengage reach out to them. Even if you’re cranky and stressed they want to help. And they did! Here begins yesterday’s rant: I purchased the course DIRECTLY FROM CENGAGE for two years with the Cengage and e-text book. I downloaded this useless app signed in only to find NOTHING. NOTHING AT ALL. I can only access my TWO YEAR purchase via Canvas. Which means I CANNOT LOOK AT THE BOOK WHILE DOING MY CANVAS OR CENGAGE WORK! WTAF?!? EPIC FAILURE FOR A COMPANY PROFESSING TO BE LEADERS IN ACADEMIA TO BE THIS FAR BEHIND IN REMOTE LEARNING. YES I AM YELLING, I AM SO IRRITATED WITH CENGAGE!

by @gobezerk

Not sure what these other people expect, but CengageRead does its job for me. I wanted a way to read my cengage books for college on my phone, and CengageRead does just that. Granted, its not the next candy crush, but it doesn't have to be so im don't get why the reviews for CengageRead are so brutal lol.

4/5. It'd earn 5/5 if the UI was cleaned up a bit more and if there was a dark mode... reading for a while and staring at the all white screen starts to strain the eyes.

by Htmlpython

So many negative reviews made me upset that CengageRead may not be a reliable source to use my Cengage A&P course, but after a quick download and use I can say it works properly -AS A BOOK- from going back and forth to exiting out of my book. It would be awesome to continue my progress on my course through CengageRead and allow me to complete activities that would be amazing. Other than that one recommendation I believe CengageRead fulfills its purpose as a book.

by Ellifants

I like that the textbooks are easy to read. The writing is big and it's very easy to navigate your book. It's also very easy to access the read aloud feature. My one complaint is that when you hit the back button in the top left corner, it takes you to the library. If I was in the table of contents, click on the wrong chapter by accident, and hot the back button, I expect to return to the table of contents. Instead, it takes me all the way out of the book to my library. This causes me immediate frustration 5-10 times a day. Otherwise, great app. Easy way to read textbooks on the go.

by Monrockets

I had been hoping for Cengage to come out with an app for their products for a little while now and am happy to say that Cengage Read is what I was looking for!! I mostly use it for the eBook features which are straightforward and user friendly. It took me a minute to figure out how to log in and download but after a few attempts everything went smoothly:)

by _Beverly14

I just downloaded CengageRead since I am taking a course that requires MindTap. I was able to use CengageRead just fine! I saw a lot of bad reviews where people complain about this or that and honestly, ignore them. Someone said the online browser didn’t work so they were forced to use app, well they both work as you will soon find out after downloading CengageRead. Someone else said highlighting didn’t work, worked just fine I was even able to add notes to my highlight and change its color. Scrolling through pages was easy it’s like any other program like Pearson where the chapter is split up in segments so the page you are on is the segment. I don’t know why people are complaining you don’t have to know rocket science to use CengageRead.
The only thing I would change is maybe making the text reader more human like, it sounds to much like a robot. I like to listen to the chapters being read so I can do other things at the same time and not spend hours watching a screen.

by Chloe The Cool

I have loved the cengage-read app ever since the relaunch. Specifically, I use CengageRead to read my business textbook. I love how I can highlight, add notes, listen as an audiobook, and bookmark specific pages. Most importantly, I love how I can read my textbook wherever I go. I will be traveling to Florence this upcoming spring and cannot wait to have the option to access my materials in whatever country I will be visiting. I would recommend this out to everyone and anyone.

by Curlyqueue2

I’m not sure why all the negative reviews. I almost didn’t download CengageRead because the reviews were so bad, but, once I read them, I realized they seemed like whining and not actual reviews of CengageRead . So, here is a review on CengageRead and how it works. I downloaded CengageRead in order to read the text book on my phone. It had me log into my Cengage account, and it had all my text books available to choose from. CengageRead is intuitive to use, similar to Kindle, Libby, or any other reading app I’ve used. It has both, a slide bar and a table of contents, to find the page you need. You can flip or scroll while reading through, and you can pick font size. This is a reader app, and it does what it is supposed to do.