Cambridge Spiral 4+

Cambridge University Press switched from a perfectly decent third-party ebook reader that they used for the previous edition of a textbook I teach from to this app for the new edition (a racket in itself, of course). This reader doesn’t support the most basic features of an ebook reader or an iPad app. It appears to have no support for iPad multitasking, so I can’t have my notetaking app or the app I work problems in up while reading the book. The text rendering is incredibly ugly, especially for equations, rather than using the typesetting in the paper version of the textbook. This is the worst of all worlds, especially given that they used the perfectly decent Bookshelf by VitalSource for previous editions. A serious downgrade — though of course now they won’t sell the old edition of the textbook that uses the much-better reader.

This is a horrifyingly bad eReader. I cannot believe Cambridge University Press produced such a poor piece of software. On an iPad, you can only read in landscape orientation, and each chapter of the book I’m reading is one long, long, long vertical scroll. The typography of the mathematics is fuzzy and ugly… it’s apparently just a bitmap. After accidentally creating a bookmark in the wrong spot, I gave up after trying fifteen times to remove it because the popup menu disappears as soon as it appears. A PDF would be 10,000% better, but CUP doesn’t care about that because this garbage reader lets them lock up the book that I paid $70 for. I will never buy another book that uses Cambridge Spiral.

This reader doesn’t have any basic functions or features that the most basic readers have. The text to speech option is absolutely horrible. Go back to the drawing board and develop a better app! It’s absolutely pathetic that we have to use this for school.