Cengage Read 4+

I never have any interest in writing reviews for an app, but because this app is absolutely horrendous AND I’m required to use it everyday for school… I figured this was a worthy effort. There aren’t any instructions on the fact that you have to add your textbook to your library even if you purchased it. It zooms in and out on the text for absolutely no reason at all, and most times it will cut off half the text and won’t adjust appropriately even when you try to zoom out to reset the view. Highlighting is horrendous because it wants to glitch out and highlight whatever random text it wants. The view of the textbook is quite unprofessional in my opinion. It’s like they put it in the app without even thinking about how it would look to people reading it. You can’t even read most tables that they insert in the text. It’s an absolute joy to deal with this. In this day and age, I have no clue why two of my professors would choose this option. And yes, MindTap was required for me so I had to get the digital version and the unlimited subscription is much cheaper than buying physical textbooks and the addition software. Please, for the love of learning, don’t make me hate my class because this app and website are absolutely archaic.

This app 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 the app isn’t bad but it has issue small issues that make it bad .. my choice for replying is because I like using this app 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

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.