ReadAnywhere 4+

Functional but a few issues

This app works well for my purposes. I am able to use the audio function to listen to my text books, which is helpful since too much screen time and/or reading triggers migraines for me. However, I can not exit the app or lock my phone while listening to a chapter. Thus the screen stays on and lit-up the whole time, the touch screen is active, and the battery is quickly drained if not plugged in. The smallest accidental tap of the screen causes the audio to stop and you can’t pick up where you left off. You have to start the entire chapter again. It would be helpful if one could navigate away from the app or lock the screen and still have the audio running.

Horrible for adult students that have busy lives

I rely on etextbooks because with kindle and other PDFs I can have my phone read the pages aloud to me while I am cooking, cleaning, commuting and managing my family. Moreover, I have issues with my eyes where I cannot stare at screens for long periods of time so I reserve screen times for when I have papers and online research. I can understand not allowing copy and pasting for copyright reasons but spoken screen and spoken content with iOS does not work at all for this app which is absolutely absurd. Why would you prevent people that can’t see digital content very well from being able to have the content read to them?!?! If I were any more blind than I currently am I would not be able to use this app at all so those with vision impairment should STAY AWAY!! The “highlight and speak” feature worked the first day I tried this app and has not worked since, a feature that is also poor because you cannot pause long segments so you have to highlight very short segments at a time (which is extremely inconvenient when driving). Since that KY worked one time I have deleted and redownload this app 5 times and it still dies not work. I hope professors in the future will stay away from McGraw Hill products all together because the snout of money paid for this textbook and the lack of accessibility is absolutely outrageous.

Developer Response ,

Version 2.4 of ReadAnywhere has been enhanced to provide a read aloud feature. You can now have the content of a book read to you by accessing this feature in the overflow menu of an open book. We appreciate your feedback!

Absolute Crap

I don’t understand how such a big company like McGraw Hill could come up with such an utterly lousy app. I would give it 0 stars if I could. I am being forced to use this app for school because of school, but if you have ANY CHOICE WHATSOEVER, DO NOT USE THIS APP. You’re better off taking pictures of every single page of your textbook and using photos on your phone than using this app.

The entire app is the most inconvenient and poorly formatted. First of all, “continuous scroll” is the only option. I put continuous scroll in quotes because it isn’t even continuous. The pages are all strangely different lengths and the application stops you at the end of a page so you have to swipe multiple times before you can access the next page.

Moreover, the markup features are absolutely pathetic. There are very few markup options; they have four highlighter colors and don’t even have a handwriting option. Also, seeing as this app is geared towards iPads, the fact that Apple Pencil does not work with it is absurd. You also have to select the text you want to markup by dragging your finger around for an unholy amount of time before the markup options even show up, because as i mentioned earlier, you cannot draw on the book with Apple Pencil.