Everand: Ebooks and audiobooks Reviews

Scribd sells their subscription as “unlimited,” which is true...if what you’re after is an unlimited catalog of books you’ve likely never heard of and have no interest in reading/listening to. You can listen to between 1 and 3 popular or recent books, and then you’re prevented from reading other recent literary and/or popular titles until the following billing cycle. This is fine if you know it going in (a big if, as they’re not upfront about the details of their model for obvious reasons), but disappointing if you learn about it the hard way. I read and listen to upwards of 12 books a month, mostly recent releases. I was hoping to find a better model for my audiobook consumption (I listen 3-5 per month), but Scribd is not the one for me. It may work for you if you read significantly less or have an interest in backlist titles you’ve probably never heard of. I’m sure there are hidden gems in the part of the catalogue that’s always available, but my purpose in trying Scribd was to work through my massive TBR, not to waste hours of potential reading/listening time sifting through a virtual stack of books, the vast majority of which have little to no appeal to me. I’m left wishing that Scribd were honest about the service they offer—a couple of audiobooks per month for less than the price of one from the most popular audiobook distributor. That’s not a bad service to offer! But the mendacity of claiming the service is “unlimited” chafes me, so I’m out.

My unlimited account is consistently shut down each month after week 2 or 3 because I “read too much”. They don’t notify you when you’re approaching your “limit” nor will they explain how many books you can technically access on an UNLIMITED membership before they shut you down until your next billing cycle. As a student who uses Scribd for school assignments as well as for pleasure reading, it is extremely frustrating to sign in to Scribd and not be able to open the books I’ve been reading and using for school assignments. They are known as the “Netflix of books” but thankfully Netflix doesn’t charge me full price and then shut down my account each month because I watch too many movies. “Unlimited” memberships are very much LIMITED, so don’t read too much or else you’re paying for nothing! They try to get around the fact that their cheating their customers by saying “while all of our titles may not be available, there will always be something available to read” but what they leave out is that by “something to read” they mean books that are 100 years old and are also available for free on every other platform because they’re free public access books like Gulliver's Travels and such. Nothing I would ever want to read nor PAY to read when I can access it for free everywhere else. Scribd is amazing for about a week or two, then it’s just a scam that takes your money without providing what you paid for.

I signed up for the 30 day trail to listen to an audio book. I put in my credit card information. Standard stuff. Well, I forgot to cancel within 30 days and got charged a monthly fee. That’s my fault. Here’s where the issues arise. I log on to the website to cancel my membership and neither email that I have was recognized when I tried to log on. No sweat, I clicked forgot pasword to retrieve my password. NEVER received a recovery email. So, I submit a request to see if someone from customer support can assist. After submitting the request, I get a response 8 hours later from TESH, stating that he is unable to locate the account with the email provided. How am I being charged each month if I don’t have an account. He then asks for the last for of my credit card that I used to set up the account to assist him in locating the account. Never hear back from him. That was 2 months ago. I am still being charged monthly and I have no way of canceling the membership because I don’t have an “account”. I’ve submitted multiple help tickets since and I have never received a response back.

Everand is the best I’ve seen if it’s kind. You have so many options and they have brand new books very quickly. However, I’ve had an issue with the audiobooks for almost a month. The sound quality was awful and kept skipping. I contacted customer service right away and never received a response. I got tired of waiting for help and cancelled my membership because of it. I can’t justify paying for a service where I only get half of the benefits because the company won’t help me with a huge issue.

Update- Scribd contacted me saying they’re backlogged on support tickets. They asked me to update This review with my ticket number so they could escalate my issue to the top of the queue. However, I’m not sure customer service is as backlogged as they stated. I opened a ticket after never receiving a reply on my original one and the next day it said ‘ticket closed’. No reply. Nothing. Just closed as if the issue had been resolved or at the very least addressed. So, I opened another ticket hoping it was just a fluke. Same thing happened. It was closed. Someone in customer service closed the tickets. So, maybe not so backlogged if they could close out my tickets so quickly. Everand worked great for me for the year I used it. But I needed help with an issue on Everand . I tried every outlet I could to get help before canceling.

I’ve been a scribd subscriber since it first came out and it used to be amazing-even with a limited library the selections were enough to keep me entertained. Last few months they’ve started throttling my audible books every month to a seemingly obscene extent. When I brought it up to customer service last month they insisted I wasn’t being throttled but it had to do with licensing agreements and release dates for “certain titles” which is BS ... thing is there’s no way to “sample” an audible book without them dinging your usage-so if it’s a crappy book and I quit listening 5min, magically all the titles that WERE available prior to my preview are no longer available until the following month. You can’t convince me that’s not throttling-so “unlimited” audiobooks only applies under Scribd’s jacked up definition of the term. Ridiculously insulted at their scripted response from customer service trying to justify their methods and understand completely why you can’t CALL a customer service line🙄 you can only email and wait days for an unsatisfactory response. The product was way better at its conception. Gonna cancel my Scribd membership and double up on audible-at least they are transparent about exactly what you get for your money, you can preview a book before it counting against you, and if you have a concern-you can talk to a live person that actually values their subscribers and will do the right thing!

I love listening to audiobooks. It’s a great way for me to pass time at work and while commuting. I don’t have the time to sit down and read a book due to my hectic schedule. That’s where Scribd came in. The advertised ‘unlimited’ was great and understood that some title might come and go from availability. However, this month, I’ve only listened to one audiobook and already have restricted titles. I truly wish Scribd would take customers into account with this sort of thing and try to create a solution instead of their auto-generated responses. I’d be willing to pay an extra charge for “truly unlimited” or even if they offer “5 audiobook listens per month.” The fact that they say unlimited* with the asterisk puts everything up in the air. I wish I knew exactly what I would be getting each month. Perhaps creating a tiered program and being more transparent would avoid the upset customers because we would truly know what we are getting into for the price.

Let me be clear, I truly enjoy using Scribd. My only app issue is that I wish it told me exactly how long I have left of a book instead of “7 hour” which could mean anywhere from 7 hours to 7 hours and 59 minutes. I think Scribd is an inexpensive way for busy bibliophiles to get their fix but I think there are issues that Scribd needs to hammer out if they want to keep their customers truly satisfied.

It seems like a good app, but it’s important to know the limits on how many books you can have. I wish Everand developers would build in a stratified system in which you can read or listen to a certain number of books before the second “unlimited” level becomes the only one available. I acknowledge it is probably difficult dealing with publishers, or even perhaps having publishers as a second “costumer.” Im assuming these relationships simply require too much complexity for the average user to understand. On the other hand, I’m wondering if there is a secondary gain to being less than up front about the service. To be fair, the first month is free, and they started pulling titles three weeks before the end of my trail month. I bet statistically fewer users back out once they have signed up though. Foot in the door technique is an old advertising game. I think most literary users can smell it and feel an animosity towards scribd even if that isn’t the developers intent. Who wants to feel anxiety about making the right choice on a book before the various content cut offs engage. Please read other review to learn more about the positives. Besides this complaint, I’ve been enjoying Everand .

This would be a fantastic app if it wasn’t for the few issues I’ve had. It started when one of the books I was listening just mysteriously disappeared from the Papp with no warning at all (even though they’re supposed to tell you if it does, which will be an important point for the second issue). So I sent them an inquiry about it a few weeks ago and have yet to hear a reply. The BIGGEST issue came when I was listening to the The Wicked King. Now for this one, they were they actually sent me a notification saying the audiobook would leave Scribd on 2/16. An email I still haemve my copy of, by the way. Anyway, I tried playing The Wicked King one day and low and behold it stops working and I keep getting this message saying it’s not available. Well, this goes on for days and I send in another request for Customer Support. I hear nothing for weeks and so I email them about both tickets, and they email becomes a ticket number! I’ve never seen Customer Service take this long! I don’t think they even exist! Also, if you try to search for The Wicked King before 2/16, like I did just now, it doesn’t show up at all! Why say it’ll be there on until 2/16 when that’s clearly not true! Why don’t you send any emails out about these issues and update your customers? Customer Service just doesn’t seem to exist.

It’s not unlimited. I can never read past 3 books without everything I have saved (over 270+) books becoming unavailable until the next pay period. As you listen to books, they start trickling away to be unavailable until If you are lucky enough to listen to a third book, they are all unavailable. They always say their catalog “rotates as you listen” but that is not true. I paid for two months and didn’t listen to one book to see what would happen and guess what? Nothing happened. No books became unavailable and not one over my 270+ saved books became unavailable until the next pay period. But guess what? I listened to one book this month and 70% of my saved books became unavailable right before the book was done. Then midway through my second, all of them became unavailable. Sometimes I’ve even had the second book I am listening to shut off halfway and become available next pay period. If you are someone who listens to a book a month maybe two if you are lucky, then sure, Everand would work. But for someone who downloaded it and wanted the “unlimited” books, it’s a scam. And look at their real reviews and twitter complaints. People will cancel and still get charged. I mean hundreds of comments complaining of this. I think most of these high ratings are people who haven’t ran into this problem yet or only listen to a book a month.

I listened to two audiobooks through this service in the first week of my free trial - it was amazing the collection they had and I thought I had found my nee favorite service! I was eager to add about ten audiobooks to my library as reminders for what I wanted to try and read next. However, after I finished my second book all but maybe 2-3 books were marked as unavailable until my next billing cycle. I was shocked because earlier in the day they had been available and I had no problems with their availability during that first week. The excuse Everand provides is that it‘s due to the publisher, but the books had a wide variety of publishers and why would they suddenly be available the day after I renew my subscription? How does my billing date have anything to do with their publishers? Everand clearly puts a cap on what kinds of titles they will allow you to read and their advertising is just blatantly problematic to suggest this is not the case. Also, I noticed as I was looking through ebooks which were about the only things I could find available a lot of them are uploaded by random people in odd formatting, so I feel like something much more questionable is going on with this service! Overall, I would not recommend any avid reader or listener use this service, clearly some type of scam!

I watched available titles dwindle daily as everything listed my next billing date as the available date. I sampled several books, but only read a couple of audiobooks in a months time. Meanwhile, I can’t even search for books because unavailable titles are excluded from search results and literally everything I was searching for was unavailable. I’m talking about entire topics, not just authors. The language they use is vague and misleading at best. They reference materials being unavailable, but it’s basically everything I was looking for. Books already begun would switch to unavailable also. They make it seem as if the availability is arbitrary instead of clarifying exactly how availability works. I asked for clarification and was told to read the vague articles instead of getting an answer with details. Clearly they intend for the process to be mysterious, vague, and arbitrary instead of telling you that the number of items you open is limited. There’s no option to return bad books and actually read something else either. They should have named it enigma. They keep specific mechanics a mystery so they can sucker you into paying for a month or two before you realize what’s going on. We might be able to make the most of it if we knew how to avoid turning every title to unavailable, but that’s top secret.

3/7/19- though I am disappointed in the limit on audio books, if they had just explained up front, what the * means in regard to them instead of having us figure it out, it would not be so upsetting. So, if you do listen to a lot of audiobooks and not take advantage of the e-books, magazines and other materials, be aware that you may be limited.

Third month in and I guess I listen to too many audiobooks because all that appears now are old classic books with black covers no matter what category I choose. For instance The Boxcar Children appears under Contemporary Fiction, Scribd recommends, Mystery, Bestsellers, Mystery, Romance and every category there is. The daily recommendations has disappeared and the top lists have remained the same for over a month. I also get variations of the same canned response when I submit a ticket. This is sad for such poor customer service. I am going back to the public library for my audiobooks. Enjoy the free month and maybe the first paid, they are worth it but beware after that.

I’ve started listening to audiobooks to help me fall asleep at night. With every “update” of Everand , a new glitch seems to occur. The last time, all of the books on my Saved list would shut Everand down each time I attempted to open them on my IPhone. Customer service was exactly ZERO help in resolving the issue. It took them nearly a week to even respond, and even then, it was with an article “related to my issue”, which was not related to my issue, nor was the advice helpful. I finally resolved that issue by deleting the Scribd app from my phone and then reinstalling it. A fix they never mentioned.
Last night, all of the books on my Saved list that I have not finished now sound like they are spoken on the other side of a large fan, quiet, loud, quiet, loud, quiet, loud...with some words being cut off...like a strobe light for sound. They are unlistenable! Only books I’ve completed do not have the issue. Deleting Everand and reinstalling had no effect, nor did doing a hard reboot of my IPhone.
So variety and price of Scribd is fine, although I wish they’d add new titles more frequently. But the customer service and iOS App are terrible and I’m reaching the limits of my patience with them.

Scribd throws a a lot of misleading terms at you (looking at you “rotating content”) designed to confuse, but the more you read or listen to any current books they put caps or throttle your content. You won’t know when it will happen but suddenly you won’t be able to read or listen to the next thing until a future date (next month). Scribd says well you can find something else then. Like you didn’t sign up to actually listen or read what you want instead of some cruddy piece of content they’ll actually let you access. Essentially they are cheap and instead of better contracts with publishers which would improve access for all they take your money and then throttle you.

If you use Libby, Overdrive in conjunction you may be able to avoid also having an Audible account; but be selective so you can try to get your priority content when you want it. Careful with fallback titles while you wait tho, it can push back dates for the stuff you want without any notice whatsoever.

Scribd, if you really want to please your subscribers, improve your publisher agreements, make your throttling caps transparent and stop using your shady language to hide what everyone already knows. Grow up and treat your subscribers better please.

First of all I love Everand. I also have the Libby app but I like to check Scribd first so I can make sure I’m not taking books away from people who can only use the library. Scribd has such a large an diverse collection it’s wonderful. I will say though. I wish you could add books to your lists without having to save them. If I finished a book but I have no desire to read it again I would like to be able to remove them from my saved but keep them on my “Read” list. Also I wish the suggestions were move like the books I’ve rated on Everand . I feel like I get a lot of popular suggestions but they don’t necessarily align with the things I’ve said I liked. I would also like the option to mark a recommendation as not interested. Like I said I get a lot of recommendations for popular books but it’s the same books every time. I wish I could mark one I don’t want to read as not interested and not see it recommended again.

Seems like months I use this service heavily, like when I’m doing research, and Everand will start freezing so I can’t use it. Some months I don’t use Everand at all. Lots of times books I’m reading disappear. Titles I’ve saved disappear, even when I put them under a list instead of just the “saved” feature. I’m not sure as to what’s going on but y’all need to figure it out and fix it. If we are allowed 3 new titles a month, say so. If this is cumulative, high it should be as in 3 books a month x’s 12 months = 36 new titles a year. And sometimes I look at or start to read a new title and it’s not what I’m looking for or don’t like it then stop reading it. I don’t think that should count as one of our allowed new titles. I switched from kindle to scribd because there is a definite difference for the better with selection of titles but you system needs serious tweaking. I never had a saved book on kindle disappear….period. Even if the book isn’t available it stays in the list so you KNOW what you were or wanted to read AND for if it became available again. Work on these things please!!!

So there’s both good and frustrating sides to Everand. Good: 1. Its cheaper than audible or other services I’ve found- and most books I don’t really care to add to my library anyway because I’ll most likely only read or listen to once, so I don’t need the audible purchase option. Bad: 1. It says “unlimited” but in reality it’s only “unlimited for the first 2 weeks. After 2 weeks most of the books I have bookmarked (that were showing as available) will all of a sudden say “this title will be available on (whatever my renewal date is).” I sent a query about this and was told that it’s because titles are constantly rotating, but I looked on a friends app and the titles I wanted showed as available to her. It’s really just a ploy to get you to renew your subscription each month. Super frustrating!!! (Note: There’s still books available to me at that point, just none that I specifically want). 3. The player works well about 65% of the time. Lately it’s been stopping at the end of every chapter or jumping back two chapters and I have to re-find my place manually— also annoying. For how many books I listen to, it’s still the best deal though.

It’s a lie, it’s not unlimited. Also all my saved books were moved to not ready until my subscription renews. So yeah I’m paying for “unlimited” but I’m not getting it. I knew it was too good to be true. The annoying thing is when you submit a ticket all they give you a bunch of legal bs about how they have to remove some books from unlimited bc of the publisher. Funny how my wife who also has it and has a separate account has the book I want but mine says not available. It’s getting frustrating for sure. The latest in this lie of an app is that at the end of the month you get a wonderful email saying x amount of books are available.... and they are not. My wife had 20 books available and when she jumped on Everand only two we actually available and the rest are now available soon for the next month!!! So you will wait a whole month then nope still not ready.

That’s my whole issue with Scribd they are false advertising with unlimited and don’t tell to what your limit is. I’m fine with limited I understand it but at least informed your customer what those limits actually are. If they said you get 5-7 books hell I’ll take that over who knows you might get that book you been waiting all month long for....

Scribd is my favorite app. I got the trial several months ago to look at some pdfs, with the intention of canceling it after, but then I realized that it has audiobooks and I’ve used it every day since. There are, however, a couple of bugs that need to be worked out. For one, if you ever pause the book you’re listening to, Everand almost immediately closes in the background. So, if I pause it to talk to somebody, and then go right back, I can’t just hit “play” to resume; I have to actually reopen Everand and wait for it to load, and then start listening again. The second one is that audiobooks have a common tendency to skip back when you are away for a while—sometimes skipping back more than an hour. I’ll be listening one night and be, say, 5 hours in, and then I’ll come back the next day to find that it has reverted back to 3:45. This is very frustrating because I listen frequently for short stints, so if I am listening 4 different times a day, and, every time, I come back to find I have to skip forward 30 seconds at a time to find my place again, it takes a good 8 minutes every time to find it. Giving one star until the problem is resolved, then I’ll update to 5 stars.

I love scribd, I really do, but for those that have time to listen to multiple books this service is starting to go downhill very fast for me. I usually listen to between 3-6 books per month, easy to stream while at work. 5 months ago I could get into a series and listen to it fully. 3 months ago I could get 2 books into a series then the rest would not be available until the following month. Now I can listen to the first book in a series and can’t listen to any in that series til the next month. I start a separate series and the same thing and the library gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller til now I’m at stuff that I guess is public domain so anyone can record and put it on here and the quality and speech is horrible. I still love this service for its ease and the cost is wonderful but I’m getting frustrated with how much it seems to be penalizing for listening. I contacted customer service, who were great, about this and they said it was due to the way they set up licensing with publishers. It’s getting to the point where my frustration is wearing me out more than it’s worth. I would gladly pay more for a fuller experience.

I love Everand so much. My daughter and I compared several reading apps before trying this one. I am quite happy with it so far, and so is she. It uses very little battery life, and with the different screen color settings, I can read easily at night without hurting my eyes or disturbing my husband. The price is fairly reasonable for the amount of books you get per month, but I do wish I could either trade my audiobook credit for another book credit or gift my audiobook credit to my daughter, since I doubt I’ll use them and she wishes she had more. Haha. Other than that, I’m very happy with our choice. I can find just about any author that I search for. Oh, and the unlimited sheet music is just an added bonus for me! I’ve found music that I used to play when I was younger, and newer music as well. I’m sure that Everand is one that I’m going to keep a subscription on for a long while.

I feel like the person that posted before me. I would be willing to pay way more for a service that actually let me read what I search for. The first few months were great! I loved this service so much, until a few months back when I began getting limited on available books. Nearly every book I searched for was suddenly not available until the renewal date and many times not even then. Now if I do an author search right before my eyes they ALL change to the next month's renewal! What's this about? The only ones it may let me listen to from the author is the Abridged versions which I do not want. It was just audiobooks but as of this morning it's books as well. I do listen a lot but there's just no excuse for saying UNLIMITED and READ WITHOUT LIMITS in the advertising and it being untrue.
I have written in several times and each time it's just a lot of nonsense thrown at you with no real help. And I would LOVE to just SPEAK TO A REAL PERSON but they have no telephones. Kinda strange...
LOVE the idea of this service and LOVED this service in the beginning, still love it when it works out but it is getting increasingly harder to deal with.
Bring it back to the way it was, please guys!

The selection is quite good, and I want to love this service, but it has a fatal flaw. When listening to audiobooks, Everand advances to the next chapter maybe 50% of the time (if that). At the other times, it freezes, skips backward in chapters, or just locks up with a message of “loading” (whether or not the audiobook is downloaded to the device). I am running an updated app on a brand-new iPhone XR with tons of free space. Everand has been like this for a couple years, through many updates. It was like this on my last two iPhones as well. It does this with every audiobook (I have listened to dozens). If these inexcusable and usability-impairing issues could one day be fixed, this could easily be a must-have. For now, just be prepared to deal with these issues. To manage, I close Everand and restart it every 5-10 minutes, often sorting through my whole list of audiobooks to find the one I was just listening go and trying to select the right chapter out of the table of contents. I keep the service because I listen to more audiobooks than my audible credits will ever allow, but it is extremely frustrating and just nonsensical why these software issues have persisted for so, so long.

It is unlimited, but it seems that certain books have limits imposed by the publisher, so if you don’t DOWNLOAD the book you want, you just save it (so basically it is on your reading list, but not downloaded), it can be sort of out-of-stock before you get to it. I waited a few weeks until 9/4 for some books I wanted, then a few days after 9/4, some of them already said not available until 10/4, then the date changed to 10/5. I started to worry it was a scam, but on 10/5, I was able to download about a dozen books I’d been waiting for. It is a good value, as long as you are willing to be flexible and wait sometimes. It’s a bit like waiting for books to come back in to the library. But considering the cost of audiobooks retail, it’s a good deal.

** That said, the latest update seems to have a glitch, and keeps crashing about 20 seconds after I start my book. I can listen from my computer, but that is certainly not as convenient. I’ve enjoyed Everand for months without a problem, so I really hope they fix this ASAP!