Cengage Mobile App Reviews

We transfer money over €4 billion every month. We enable individual and business accounts to save 4 million Euros on bank transfer fees. Want to send free money abroad or transfer money abroad for free? Free international money transfer!

Do better.... I have not had the same issues as the other reviewers (knock on wood)... I’m able to read my textbook on my phone and have it read to me. The app still needs some MAJOR improvements. Especially since the textbooks are so expensive. It’s unacceptable... Cengage needs to take the responsibility of making this app better for students. There is no excuse. I’m giving the app 3 stars because it’s function for me... BUT there is one huge problem I’ve faced... The app doesn’t save highlights and pages to my account. So, when I go on my computer, the pages I saved on my phone and the areas I highlighted to not reflect on the Cengage website. This is really disappointing and should be changed.

DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY. Do not waste your money, and if you have a voucher from your school for this, don’t waste your schools money. This app and this site in general are COMPLETELY AWFUL. Books don’t load and if they do, have fun highlighting without your phone or computer crashing. Tried to contact a representative but all they did was tell me to clear my cookies (which has only made the problems worse). For the amount of money spent on this service I expect better quality when it comes to product and customer service. Cengage left me having to explain to professors why I was unable to complete assignments. Received my first ever failing grade since I was unable to access my book. EXTREMELY UNHAPPY. WILL NOT USE AGAIN.

Almost Useful. This is so so close to being somewhat useful. It’s almost reasonable to take this app and use it in a pinch (like studying on a plane or something), but it’s just not quite worth it. I downloaded this app on my phone to use the audiobook feature while I drive or travel, but the player is absolute garbage. The voice is choppy and difficult to understand if you’re not reading along, and you can’t even change it to a better voice. You can’t pick a spot to start reading, just like the website reader, but this doesn’t even have a scrub bar! There isn’t even that terrible feature where the reader starts at the top of your screen, it starts at the beginning of THE CHAPTER. You can’t rewind and you can’t jump to a different section. To their credit, you can at least set the reading speed to 2x, but that just makes everything less understandable. I also like the search feature, it’s pretty nifty. Really my only complaint is the absolute garbage reader.

Add Multifunction. Definitely need to add the multifunction capability so I can use the Centgage app and a note taking app at the same time. This is a basic capability students use. I’m forced to use the browser version which lacks the highlighter feature off the app. We know you try to please the universities and not the paying students because they don’t have a choice. Students are rising up because they don’t understand why they pay a university tuition and then have to buy their course work from a third party. Don’t be one of those companies that straight exploit students. Decades of overpriced textbooks have been bad enough.

So far so bad. I haven’t even used it a whole day and I’m disappointed. The app struggles with basic functions that it’s designed to do. For instance when I open up the table of contents and ask it to go to a certain section of my text: It takes a long time and most of the time doesn’t go to the section so asked it to go to. That’s on my iPad. On my iPhone it won’t even display the text correctly. It glitches the text off to the side so you can’t even read it. Cengage needs to seriously dedicate sometime to fixing this app. You’d think they’d have gotten the message since it has an over 1.6 star rating over 4+ years. But they obviously don’t care about their users.

Garbage Letters. Apostrophe’s and other symbols are turned into a garbled mess, making it extremely difficult to work through a programming course. Inability to resize font is detrimental to eyesight and makes it hard to read. Strange cutoffs and formatting causes entire paragraphs to go missing in between pages until you restart the app. Load times between pages are ridiculous, and I’m on a brand new iPad. Some books are 10+ years out of date and contain wrong information - these are IT courses, they need to be more current! The on screen reader voice is robotic. There are far better AI voice readers out there that do not sound like crap. Use one or get some voice talent. This is basic stuff for a reading application. Won’t even get into how you can’t do your activities in the app. Fix it.

Better. But needs help. From the past reviews here, I can see that the app is improving! But when I try to read my downloaded textbook (ofc on cengage) using my phone on it's side, it shows half of the text on one side and then whatever figure is being using on the other half. But it never shows the entire paragraph or figure being used. Vertically splits both in half. Difficult to explain. Very disappointing

Very easy to use multiple features. I love it,!. Honestly the reviews were bad and it stopped me from downloading it at the beginning of the semester but honestly the app IS JUST WHAT IT IS. it’s an eReader!! Super helpful and honestly I’m very pleased with the many ways you can use it. I love to just read off my iPad than my laptop all day. Love the interface. I really do.

It’s....Cengage. I have never been happy with Cengage as a website. It is an unnecessary tool that lazy teachers use to “teach” their classes. They basically make you pay for a unique digital access platform, which is just a virtual machine, which anyone can install on their PC with any copy of any OS they want for free. The app though, since I a still be forced to use Cengage the site, is better than I thought it would be. The site is very difficult to navigate, it runs incredibly slow and the layout makes no sense, but the app is simpler, just what it needs to be. I’ll update if I run into problems.

eBook Feature Not Consistent. For context I am using this app on an iPad so one of the main functions I’d like to use is the reading the eBook. The ebook doesn’t have good resizing meaning if you’re using the app side by side you can’t zoom out - it simply resets the text. And even worse, sometimes the book is not available. So I’m at my wits end and must use the website. If there’s going to be a vertical integration ie they make the book, website, and app, one would expect a better experience given they are licensing the material. They aren’t running a charity. Make it work. Having STEM courses and ineffective technology, the irony is not lost. Nothing worse than trying to access Computer Science material and the tech won’t cooperate.

Instructors, please do not use Cengage for your classes.. This is a garbage app pretending to be an easy way to access course materials. There is nothing convenient about this app. The ebook reader looks terrible and is hard to read. As far as I can tell the font button does nothing. There is no design to the ebook. Each page appears to be a screen shot from a word document not divided into actual pages but just scrolled to fit a section of a book on to one ebook page. The cuts are terrible with information crammed at the top and bottom of the page and laid out in such a way that no other ebook publisher would ever think of doing because it is such a horrible design.

There is nothing better out there!. Plenty of bugs, weird layouts, and just strange decisions that went into the making of this app. Best part, is that this is from a for profit group. They want to make major buck on you, and understand that they don't need to be accessible on all platforms in order to get you to buy their wonderful services. So although there is all that, there really is nothing else that is any better. Thank you for the product! Can I add more to my shopping cart?!

It used to be fine until the update. This most recent update made this app unusable. The text formatting is all sorts of messed up. The default format is beyond tiny. If you increase the font size, you increase the leading (the space between lines). So in order for me to have the font at a normal size I can read, I end up with 1/4 of the info per page. This has also messed up how images and charts are displayed, making them even smaller, forcing my to pinch to zoom in. But if you zoom in or out, you can no longer turn the page? It’s just... bad. I am so angry as I primarily read my text in my phone and now this app is unusable. Please please fix it.

Useless app. I was using the app for reading my text book and the app stopped working. I deleted then reinstalled the app but the app stopped granting me access to the book. I can still view the book through the website, just not the app. I went to customer support chat on the website. I entered my name and email then was directed to an agent who also wanted my name and email. That agent directed me to technical support. My browser refreshed and I started the process over again. When I was directed to technical support a second time, I waited in a queue for 15 minutes before I was given the response “no agents currently available.” I started the process over again. Now I’m waiting in another queue. I should be studying instead of dealing with this. For the amount of money I pay for these materials you’d expect the app to just work.

Find something else.. If you are a professor, find another application/text combination. If you are a student considering taking a class that utilizes this material, don’t. The actual “app” is useless. Most exercises must be done in a browser. Browser access is awkward and not user friendly. The menu is meant to guide you through text with videos, exercises and quizzes to supplement material, which would be great in theory if actually executed properly. The reality is that the text is segmented and difficult to scroll through. Charts are cut off from vision with no easy way to scroll down. Expanding charts pop up in a narrow half screen that can’t be expanded, so you have to scroll back and forth in the narrow little screen to read them. So much for visual aid. Assignments missing in main menu that show up as a zero in grade book. “Memory aid” videos are annoying and create elaborate confusing scenarios for “learning” some terms that I actually already know from other classes. The developers of this program should take a look at studies on learning in electronic apps, specifically pertaining to the concentration loss that results from having to jump back and forth in screens and find where you left off. If I could give this zero stars, I would. If it wasn’t too late to drop the class, and if doing so wouldn’t affect my financial aid, I would.

Terrible app. Only using it because my university forces me to. Problems: 1) Every time you have to do something else with your device the whole app restarts. When it restarts it does not take you to the place you were just at. You have to navigate there from the home screen. I hope you set a book mark. 2) Some times during the audio playback it will just randomly mid sentence jump ahead a couple chapters. Totally confusing. 3) Make sure you have your auto rotate locked out. Accidentally turning your phone and changing the orientation of your screen will bounce you to somewhere unrecognizable on the page.

E-book viewing is horrendous. When I am on the go traveling to see family or just out and about and have some spare time to read my textbook so I do not fall behind on the material. Well it is pretty difficult to read with the e-book because it tends to glitch out while reading! I go to the next page and then if I need to re-read the previous page, I click on previous page or swipe to go back but what it does it takes me to a different page like if I just skipped one or takes me to page that I have read before the one I was trying to get to. Also clicking on the contents to go to a certain chapter at times it just takes me to the title page or not load at all. Why am I paying money to read books and have easy access to but not able to read them with no problem!? Doesn’t make sense and fix these issues! I know I am not the only one. There’s no point of paying for this service if it does not want to work properly like it should!

A lot can be improved on. I haven’t been using the app for a long time but some things I’ve noticed that can be improved upon are the following: Syncing highlighted or bookmarked text in books across devices that are logged in on the same account. If I want to read and highlight information on my phone, it would be nice if it showed on my iPad. Being able to do quizzes on my iPad or iPhone would most helpful. At minimum the iPad because if I’m on the go and need to get work I can’t just log into a laptop I don’t have. The same could be said about study cards. If I want extra study time on the go being able to pull the flash cards my phone or iPad would be nice and helpful. I haven’t played around with the auto reader too much but the little bit I did, it sounds bad.

Asking Professors to stop using. I am definitely speaking to my grad school professors about NOT using Cengage next semester if the app for iPad and iPhone doesn’t make some serious improvements. It’s a complete struggle and waste of my money and time. This app could definitely be improved. First, I downloaded on my iPhone. The description indicated you could read OR listen on the app. I see no way to listen. I also cannot rotate my phone to make the text bigger. The A icons at the top suggest you can change text size. That icon does absolutely nothing. I’d love to use this app, but some real improvements are needed. Second semester in a row and it hasn’t gotten any better. The app for my iPad rotates now with the new update but you still cant change text size and now wherever there are apostrophes or quotes, it leaves symbols. Makes it really hard to read. Also, at the bottom of some pages the words get cut of. The update was NOT an improvement. Please get someone to fix these issues. The cost of your digital rentals are insane for such few perks.

Useless and a joke.. You can’t look at any content other than the textbook, and the only SLIGHTLY useful feature is searching within the text. But the results it gives you won’t reference the chapter, nor will it properly navigate you to the text. Can’t highlight without the selected text glitching out, and is barely compatible for anything else. I prefer just buying the textbook over this useless and overpriced subscription. You can’t even look at other courses unless you know the reference number, so it isn’t truly unlimited either. Oh, not to mention now that the app CRASHES before it can even fully open on my iPad. So I can only look at the textbook when I have a computer in front of me. A printed textbook is less of a hassle. I hope colleges realize how much of a scandal and a joke this is. If you plan to charge college students more money, at least make your basic functions work. If your teacher requests the Cengage subscription, PLEASE try to find a work around if you can. It’s not worth the time, effort, or money.

Accessible - NOT. This app is extremely difficult for vision impaired people to use. It attempts to rely on iOS accessibility options in it’s claim to be ADA compliant, but the texts aren’t formatted in a way that is easily read by the screen reader. There’s no way to select a specific portion of text to be read, and no way to enable continuous reading. Playback may start on the page being displayed, or it may start in a completely different part of the book, and there’s no way to determine where the cursor is or what place playback is going to start. Overall - total fail on ADA compliance. Another publisher too concerned about making a few extra pennies to realize people with disabilities read book too.

Worst UI I’ve Ever Used. I’ve used some pretty terrible apps prior to this but Cengage takes the cake. The mobile books are a joke and are virtually unreadable. The graphics that go along with the book are just as easy to read as they are on desktop. (Complete garbage). Cengage should take some of the $120 they over charge for unlimited in order to profit off students and hire a real app developer. This thing is a complete joke. Thanks for the highlight feature but it’s no use if the book doesn’t load! Edit: the pages displayed with texts boxes are atrocious. I can’t read then because they’re split into syllabic sentences that are 70 lines long to cover two sentences. This app is a joke just like this company. If you’re going to offer students books on mobile, make sure you test the version before putting it out.

Version 7.0.1 works great. Just try it!. In August 2020, I saw a bunch of low reviews so I almost didn’t even download the app but I’m glad I did. The latest update worked great for me including highlighting, book marking and my favorite feature which is to have the text narrated or spoken aloud. There is a lot to gain and very little to lose so give it a try and leave an honest review.

Mostly useless.. Only useful if you plan to read your book offline. All the other features on this app are convoluted and glitchy. Highlighting feature does not work properly. Anything you highlight will erased once you close and reopen the app. The narration feature is hard to adjust because the display comes and goes without rhyme or reason. The layout of the book is difficult to navigate. If you swipe to the next “page” or swipe back to a previous “page” it will go to next/previous section entirely. Needs a lot of improvements.

Works fine for me. Not sure why people are saucing on this app so much, but it appears to do exactly what I need it to do (display my textbook offline). I find it much more functional than the browser version that stupidly logs you out every couple hours. Also, people mentioned multitasking on the iPad not working, but maybe that was on an older version of the app. It seems to work fine for me.

New 7.0 update rendered this app useless. App used to be fine before the 7.0 update, but now I can’t highlight without it being finicky and laggy. The main problem is the inability to scroll vertically after pressing the answer button on my textbook to reveal the answer to the practice problems at the end of each chapter. I would have to restart the app to be able to scroll vertically again. Very annoying! Please fix scrolling in general! The app sometimes recognizes vertical scrolling as horizontal scrolling and it gets annoying as when I scroll back to the chapter I’m on, the app would go back to the chapter title page, making me scroll all the way down to the current page I’m on.

It’s the Worst App I Use For School. I downloaded the app for 2 reasons: to try to get homework assignments done and to have access to the textbook on my iPad. I can only see my assignments, not actually get them done on my iPad. The ebook feature is very inconvenient and tedious to use. Any time my iPad locks itself, I lose my place in the textbook. The table of contents is not functional, as it will sometimes just send me to a random section of the chapter instead of the one I wanted to go to. The app as a whole feels shoddily made and needs improvements to provide even basic and base-line functional access to study materials.

It works...okay. It’s a little on the basic side but it works ok. Should be improved. There is a drop down content menu in the ribbon containing links to only the parts of the book but not to individual chapters. After jumping to a particular part of the book, navigating through the chapters is done by swiping left or right. Reading or navigating within a chapter is done with vertical scrolling, which I prefer. It’s how I read books in the Apple Books app. I wish there was a way to jump directly to a chapter. A table of contents at the beginning of the book with links to individual chapters would be nice.

Broken. I have never been able to use it. Despite all access I have from the browser when open the app with my confirmed credentials it only show me that’s yellow banner that says: “Only the reader and study tools are supported for this course l”. Yes, I’ve been trying to fix this with customer support and nothing. I can do nothing on the app and I have to access it throughout the browser. Very bad experience, not like advertise. Needs improvement ASAP. Once is done (if ever) I can access it and give it another go. But for now out of my iPhone.

Update makes ebook, well, useless. I’m currently taking a summer class that uses this program, and I’ve relied on the ebook, search, and highlight functions to get me through the course so far. I logged in this morning to discover that I can no longer highlight, search words, and barely scroll through the book. Besides being disappointed in the change in the app, I’m very concerned as I have half the course left and have to read 5 chapters this week... going to have to explore the web aspect on my laptop and hope for the best I guess. I’m hoping these issues can be addressed soon so I can maintain my academic pursuits.

Can’t log in. So I assume that an app made for mobile devices will make reading a text book on said device much easier than trying to use browser controls. The problem I ran into is that I cannot log in to the app at all, I guess because all my courses are concave through blackboard. It’s absolutely absurd that I can take 10+ classes using cengage, but if I want to read on my phone I have to make a new account and pay for something I’ve already paid for. If there is a way to log in using my blackboard credentials then spending a half hour searching forums and the cengage support page should have uncovered something. This app is nothing but a money grab!!! If this is representative of the company’s value system then cengage needs to be replaced by a company that cares about the education of the students they supply! After reading other reviews it seems I’m lucky that I couldn’t log in to see the disaster that the app really is.

Hey Don’t Be So Mean. I decided to write a review because I feel l need to help defend this app. Maybe it’s because I downloaded it with extremely low expectations that I was more than pleased with how it turned out to be. I downloaded it for one purpose: to read my textbook offline and in a dedicated app. Based on another review, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to. I normally access my book through a link in my Canvas course, and I was afraid it wouldn’t show up when I logged in with the personal email address I used to create a Cengage account with at some point. However, it showed up in my “Books” and gave me the option to download, which I did. I had no expectations of being able to multitask by having pages side by side. I don’t know how anyone could do that on an iPhone screen anyway. As far as the textbook layout, it’s a little different from the browser version, but I don’t find it difficult to use. It’s more like a normal textbook with multiple pages in a section instead of one long screen you scroll through for each section. Anyway, if you just want an app to read your textbook with, here you go.

Continue to be logged out even though I'm registered. Reading a textbook on your phone is convenient but that's the only reason for downloading this app. I can't view flash cards or view my homework assignments, I can only see their due dates or just grey squares under the flash card tab. I might as well delete the app since it was described as something totally different than what it is actually capable of doing, which is to say not a lot! Really dissatisfied with this app. Hopefully my instructor will choose another book soon.

Great idea horrible execution. This is a great idea. If everything worked the way it’s supposed to this would be the most awesome app and would make students lives way better. The problem is it doesn’t work on a phone. You can’t make the font bigger so you have to zoom in and then move left and right. A lot of characters don’t transfer and just look like random symbols so you can’t even read some part of the text. The text doesn’t even fit on the flash cards so you can only read part of the flash card. I really hope cengage can fix this because this has the potential to benefit so many people.

Missing Text and Horizontal-Orientation Issues. So much text is missing, and some in-text definition links won’t respond. Sometimes the app itself “forgets” to capture my highlights, which I then have to re-highlight everything that was lost. The biggest issue I’m experiencing so far is the soul-crushing feature of horizontal-orientation. Most often when I interact with the application (ex: highlighting and touching the screen) in horizontal view, it flips to another chapter.

Not terribly bad but way under potential. This app can do a few minor things pretty well - read the ebook, view grades, do flash cards, and see upcoming assignments (I’ve never needed assignments or polls). Some of these are not very useful considering most people have the due dates in a calendar and know the grade for each assignment because they see it when they turn them in. Flash cards are a decent feature, and reading the book is ok with decent accessibility features like font sizing and aural reading (although the robot voice is not very pleasing to the ear). However, there is so much more potential here to use an iPad as a educational tool. Apple Pencil could easily be used in the book to highlight and scribble notes in the margins on an iPad, and have it sync between logins/devices. I also feel like viewing lesson videos could be easily implemented. These two things alone would make this a nice supplemental tool.

Very poorly made. I am super disappointed with this app and content itself! Firstly, the whole thing that classes in colleges require students to buy this material, is outrageous! Students are forced to buy this online books ,but not only books, also the assignments included, which adds to the price! Well, ok, I guess that is the reality we live in , and we buy this books with fool access to not only book, but to the assignments as well, but apparently the access is only for 4 months!! So, it’s not even purchase, it’ s a rental!!!! Then, when you open the class , and read the book, the book is not formatted even! Grammar is not followed whatsoever! Hi can not even read and understand the text because of this poorly- poorly made material! I don’t even bring to the attention, that if this company- Cengage forcing colleges to switch to paperless books and provide the access online, supposedly, we live in digital time these days, but their app Cengage doesn’t even support the assignments on the iPad!!! So, what is point?! Why do i even bother to download the app, if this app doesn’t support any activity provided by the course! Very disappointed! Just because of this reason, i search for classes where material is not tight to this company in any way! Horrible experience!

Works to download books for offline use. I just downloaded this app so that I could access my books while on a plane ride. So far, it’s doing the job I need it to do. It definitely doesn’t seem to do every feature it promises, but it works for the purpose I downloaded it for. I only took off one star because it seems to have some trouble loading sometimes, so that is a bug that could be fixed.

Cengage: Please just stop. Using Cengage’s e-reader, and accessing the associated “MindTap” materials is infuriating. It doesn’t have to be this way. Cengage: if you’re going to create an educational ecosystem and charge and arm and a leg for it, you better actually provide a decent product. This is unfortunately the worst experience I’ve had with an “eBook” to date. Their servers can’t handle the number of students using the service and recently had a massively inconvenient outage. Bookmarks and highlighted passages mysteriously vanish from the app, something that’s unforgivable when I’m trying to research. There’s no obvious way to identify page numbers or paragraph locations, so citing the book as a resource is almost impossible. The UI is unresponsive and occasionally crashes. I got prompted for the app to track my location—why would you need that, Cengage?! I’m taking every possible opportunity to complain about your terrible products. Let me buy the book as a PDF, load it in Acrobat, and stop wasting your engineering resources on gatekeeping knowledge. Your priorities are out of alignment with what students and teachers need, and I hope your shareholders are as ticked off as your users are. I don’t want your MindTap features, I don’t want your “flash cards,” I don’t want your app. Let me learn MY way and stop wasting resources in the pursuit of control. Put it on Kindle, give it to Openstax, let buyers get a PDF, I don’t care. Just stop this.

It’s Ok, I’m used to Revel. I’m used to a different reading textbook app/online tool for my schoolwork. This app was very hard to use at first until I just kept playing around because I was curious of how I was going to be able to complete my reading assignments and the activity work. This is ok, just slide your finger down to get to the bottom of the page and go on, it can Read for you and highlight which I like. I just wish that I was able to do the activity work on my phone as well. I don’t see a way to notify when an assignment would be due a few days before, that would be very useful as well if the feature isn’t present already, it is a bit adventuring to get around to understanding the gist of how this app works.

7.0 - lost highlight ability. The cengage mobile app updated today to 7.0 and NOW I’ve lost the ability to highlight text. What went wrong? Would love to have this feature back. When I drag my finger over text to highlight, and the box with three options comes up (LISTEN, NOTE, HIGHLIGHT) and I select either NOTE or HIGHLIGHT I get kicked out of the app so I need to reopen it, and nothing is highlighted when I return. I even restarted the phone, logged out and then back in. Still I can’t highlight. Can I get a fix for this?

Good for reading. Even though the reviews for this app are bad, I don’t think it’s too bad. Just like another reviewer, I just downloaded it so that I can read my book when I’m traveling or don’t have access to a computer. It does the job, theres a table of contents to see each individual chapter and section, you can highlight text, and when clicking on an underlined word, it brings up the definition. I haven’t looked at the other features of this app but if you want to download it for the sole purpose of reading the textbook then it’s a good app!

Why all the complaints???. I have this app on my iPhone 8 with version 14.2 and my iPad (8 yrs old) with version 12.4.9 and this app runs great on both devices; takes a little longer to download the ebook on iPad but pretty sure that's just due to the age of my iPad. I'm not sure why all the complaints but I've had no problems accessing the ebook or study book on either device.

Worst ‘productivity’ app. Etext books are supposed to be easier for me to read and study on the go, but this app makes it impossible. I contacted Cengage and they did next to nothing to help. 1. I am unable to bookmark the page. To save my spot, I have to highlight with the cursor, and screenshot it. 2. It literally will not allow me to use annotations, I can’t highlight, and when I scroll to the end of the section, I have to hold it there, otherwise it takes me back to the previous page. It’d be great if these basic features were functional.

Needs Improvement. 1. I can’t access any activities from my mobile device which doesn’t make much sense considering this is an app for mobile devices. 2. I can create study guides via a web version of cengage but there is no way to access that study guide within the app. 3. When accessing cengage on a browser, even when I select “request desktop site,” half of the content is cut off and zooming out doesn’t bring it into view. 4. Also, if you miss an assignment you can’t go back and take it, even for practice. This is irritating because I have missed one section test for the semester and I can’t go and review or look at the question. You also can’t go back and review quizzes you’ve already taken.

It’s only fine. It’s really not terrible at all of all you’re doing is reading your textbook. I can read my textbook fine and all and I like being able to speed up and slow down how fast the person narrates. The one downside is that on the flash cards you cannot read the whole definition of the word. The sentences are cut off and it makes it really hard to know what the definition actually says.

Accessibility??????. I used this app in the past for a class and I thought it was okay. It didn’t display my assignments in a very user-friendly way but it got the job done. Now, I have the app for textbooks and it is terrible. The accessibility button does NOT click or work at all. How is that even possible?? An accessibility button that isn’t even accessible. When it worked, I liked to make the text bigger and make the paper sepia and not bright white. I have issues following text lines and it is incredibly hard to read on it now. The search button and note buttons work but the AA button doesn't do anything when I click on it.

Multitasking features non-existent. So I thought it would be more convenient to use this app instead of Safari or chrome because I constantly have to re-log in. However, the app presents itself with no multitasking features. I can have safari and my pdf-editor open side-by-side with the iPad pro’s multitasking features - however, this app must be open full screen or not at all. Very disappointing. I see no reason for this other than lazy developers. I now have to go through Safari to open my textbooks each time instead. Fix this and I honestly would go up 2 stars. Fix some other annoying things - like adding page numbers (I know this is a problem on the website version, not sure about the app). Update// I tried using the app, I CANT EVEN SCROLL THROUGH A CHAPTER IN THE EBOOK. Basically unusable. So sad.

App is now trash!. I use this application for my college book and I can not highlight anything, I search key terms and although it pulls up a list of different places that key term is used, it won’t take you to the specific place in the book to read more about it. The scrolling option is also very sensitive; while reading if my finger just happens to slide near the left or right it’ll flip the chapter and then I’ve lost where I was. I’ve used two different applications for books from my college classes and this is by far the worst I’ve ever seen! I’m not impressed at all, please fix the issues.

Wasted Potential. It almost works. Almost. Everything about this app hurts so much it’s close to working. So, so close. The sidebar has a drop down for your courses... which displays nothing when interacted with. The UI is generally well organized, but unreactive. The eBook reader is a great idea, however using vertical scrolling instead of flipping pages makes it painful to try to use. Most of the time you can’t even scroll. At all. Maybe try using the built in page scrolling to actually scroll pages and use the vertical scroll for skipping chapters? Or maybe change the ToC to a drop down menu and remove the vertical scroll? It could work so well... if only it worked.

Did you know that you can earn 25 USD from our site just by registering? Get $25 for free by joining Payoneer!

Don’t even bother. Pathetic excuse for a learning/resource platform. This company needs to up its game big time to compare with other e-publishing platforms. I purchased uni text books hoping to use this resource while traveling and it’s woeful. It doesn’t work and crashes immediately. I’ll be providing feedback to my uni for this not to be promoted to students.

Buggy and awful. Don’t recommend.

This app needs work. I mainly use the text to speech option and connecting this to Bluetooth is a pain in the backside. Sometimes you hear volume and other times not. Navigation functionality needs to be improved as well.

Terrible app - borderline theft. This is just a terrible app. Buggy, amateur user interface, highlighting is almost non functioning. How a textbook company can throw this together and feel it’s good enough is beyond me. I’ll be speaking with the head of my university department about avoiding cengage texts when developing future curriculums.

Badly broken. Crashes when loading, every time.

stupid tool. it is very very very inconvenient to use this app. I strongly recommend you buying or reading ebooks by other tools rather than this stupid tool.

Thanks for nothing. They discontinued Bookshelf support and drove us to this app, then didn’t support any of my textbooks here so now we’re stuck with the web reader. Thanks for making my uni life just that bit more difficult, exactly what I needed.

Glitchy. Glitches out of the app when I try and use it... useless

No ability of accessing computer simulations tutorials. Could add feature for accessing lab simulations in the Cengage app

Horrible app. Constantly crashes and can’t use the speak function easily. There’s also no other way to view on mobile as the website doesn’t support smaller resolutions. Very frustrating for a paid for service.

Worst app for uni textbooks. This app leaves a lot to be desired for uni textbooks. Nowhere near as good as Bookshelf app. Doesn’t highlight, unable to make notes despite having the options. It’s slow and I often need to close the app - extremely frustrating when I am trying to read. Unfortunately, I had to give it a one star rating, when in fact it deserves no stars or maybe half a star. Definitely don’t recommend this app!

Rubbish. Just an iPhone app expanded. Just one more online educational resource putting profit over programming. The reader is unusable, which considering is the only way to access the paid for course text is completely unacceptable and should never have passed quality checks. Get with it.

App keeps crashing on my iPad!. Have tried multiple times to get into my uni textbook which I paid for and can only use though this app that keeps crashing!

Don’t let your uni push this.. The app and site is slow, it crashes continually, pages on text are skipped and go missing, and the developer / company is clearly to under-resourced or arrogant to do anything about it. I need this text for my course, however this resource is so bad I am considering dropping the course. I will be expressing my views to the uni in hope future students will not experience this.

Terrible highlighting, text to speech garbled. Highlighting still terrible, I select a word and it selects just to the right of where I wanted so it doesn’t select the entire world. Text to speech function doesn’t work either, wont read the text properly it just comes out in spoken garble. Wish I had the option to buy this textbook through another company because this platform stinks.

Not user friendly. Have to use this for uni. I thought this would be a good option because there’s the option of having the book read out loud but it’s quite poor. The last phrase or couple of words of each sentence is skipped. I am unable to select a section to be read out loud. I have to listen from the start of the chapter. Pretty annoying if you click the wrong thing and have to start it from the top.

Cannot change to English in text to speech. This App keeps defaulting on my iPhone to non-English text to speech. It’s the only app doing this and there’s nothing on how to fix it. Still waiting for developers response. Glad I don’t rely on text to speech.

Thanks for nothing but taking my money. I bought my uni textbook here, started using it on ipad. Crashes after about 30mins of using it and then I can't even open the textbook again. Because of co-vid I'm out of a job and don't have the money to buy a hard copy or even an ebook from somewhere else. I'm so disappointed in this app. And well done cengage for giving so many people a bad experience.

Not useful. Made to use this program for university. I was excited to find that there was a mobile app. However most of the material used eg tests and videos don't work through here. Just log in through safari it works better. Oh and have to buy through the US... great!

Not user friendly. Horrific app.

Highlight tool is so frustrating! UPDATE - CANNOT ACCESS BOOK AT ALL NOW. EDIT: I’ve just updated the Cengage App. I now CANNOT OPEN THE BOOK I PAID FOR AT ALL! I know I’m shouting, but I paid rather a lot of money for this book, I have an exam in several weeks, and I AM UNABLE TO OPEN THE BOOK I PAID FOR. The app just crashes every time. Is there any testing that actually goes into these app updates? I don’t know if the highlighting tool has started to work more effectively (as mentioned below), because I can’t open the book! If anyone from Cengage actually reads these reviews, could you possibly provide some insight into how I can open the book? ________________ The highlighting tool for books in the reader is INCREDIBLY frustrating! It sometimes works OK, but a lot of the time it highlights random extra words, or half the page, and it is impossible to amend correctly. And on some pages (usually those with a Table or a picture near the top) the user cannot highlight anything at all. Highlighting is the way I study, and I imagine many other students are the same. As Cengage focuses entirely on books for learning, and they have chosen to provide no other way to read a book that they charge a lot of money for, the least they could offer is an effective way to study. The web version of it is even more frustrating though - all that is offered there is the option to highlight a single word. What is the point of that? Cengage, please review your software further, and perhaps look at the way other software companies do highlighting effectively?

Crashes. Crashes often

Won’t work on my iPhone!!!. My phone keeps crashing. So frustrating, I was looking forward to been able to read uni books at night as my phones got a good blue light filter on it. Can you please make this app compatible with iPhones

Lazy, contemptuous teaching. A deeply flawed cynical lazy handover of teaching responsibilities to an app. About as engaging as a ruler across the knuckles. Why do we let people who are obviously over teaching remain in the profession? Because if you forced this garbage on your students that’s what you obviously are.

Keeps crashing. Just updated to fix bugs, cannot get into any of my purchased books. Very disappointed in Cengage app

Unable to even open up a textbook. For a while I was able to open my textbooks on this app but now they don’t work. I wish we could go back to using the Bookshelf app to access our textbooks.

Terrible. If you want to make your learning experience unnecessarily frustrating and difficult, this app is for you! Do yourself a favour and just don’t do it. I’m now going to purchase another copy of the ebook so I can use a different ebook provider because I absolutely cannot study using this soul destroying pile of poo poo. Hope you enjoy my money Cengage. You suck.

Excellent to read on!. I really like this app to read the text on.. I like the flash cards and quizzes. The only thing I would say is it’s frustrating that the it doesn’t remember where you last read from..

No functionality at all.. There is no functionality in this app. The text, font, line-spacing found on VitalSource are missing. How are you supposed to read such a tiny font? Nobody should have to tap a book all the time to read it. What appears to be the customisation button, only relates to spoken word/reading. Truly disappointing. You wonder if the academic institution publishing with Cengage is aware of the shoddy app the book must be read with. What was wrong with VitalSource? This needs to be fixed quickly.

Worst app ever. Always difficult to load ebook. often unavailable and therefor not accessible to use .... search-ability is poor and doesn’t recognise phrases or able to search sentences . . . very frustrating.... i’ll contact consumer affairs , office of fair training and ACCC no access to book i’ve paid. and to top that off , the ebook which i paid a lot of money for m will expire on a date in future , so cengage app is eating up my access time . in my opinion if one has paid for a book . online , it should be forever . it’s like asking for a hard copy of the book to be returned . . Disgraceful.....

Great app. Enables those of us with vision impairments to read (listen) the text books at the same speed as our fellow students. Thank you so much for this app! Also, the flash cards and quizzes are spot on. Great for checking your understanding and comprehension and of the course material. I am impressed that the reader (enhanced version) even reads out the tables and diagrams. Sure there are some hiccups, but with practice you quickly learn to make bookmarks and how to slow down the pages turning while the reader catches up. Hint navigate to the place where the reader is reading from and hold your finger there until the reader stops talking, then let go 😊 Keep up the good work.

Great for learning. Limited implementation.. It’s really great that cengage provides a digital textbook for students who don’t wish to buy a paper version. However, the app could benefit with the below functions. - ability to crop page - better highlighting - dark mode - continuous scrolling - ability of change font size

Worst app in the world. Would give a zero if possible. Use to be able to access Cengage books via bookshelf app (that app actually works and works well) but in Cengages wisdom they thought they would make their own. Bad move. The app constantly crashes. Contacted support for help to fix. Keep sending me instructions on how to install. Even their support doesn’t care. I have to buy their books for University studies. If you don’t this company avoid at all costs. Apple should make them remove this app from the App Store.

Annoying. Keeps interrupting my work to ask for a rating, as if I have nothing else to do. Developers must focus on making excellent apps, that’s how you get good ratings.

Won’t download my book I purchased. Just purchased a book and says I should reboot app… I’ve die. This several times. Just dropped money on textbook and failing to deliver…surely a breach of consumer code.

Doesn’t work on iPhone. Unfortunately when I try to open my ebook in the Library, instead of opening the ebook, the app switches back to my iPhone home screen every time. I can’t open/read/or use the ebook. Seems to work on iPad, but cannot be used on iPhone X.

The worst textbooks. Cengage offers the WORST POSSIBLE WAY of accessing your textbook that we paid $78, (for an e copy only). You can only view one page at a time, it is laggy and pretty inconvenient to navigate through. You guys literally spit on customers and you shouldn’t be surprised if illegal downloads happen …

Would give zero but not an option. Have to have it for uni book or read in my laptop. Have to download book every time I go into the library. Pages take forever to load. Next time I’ll pay more and get books from another source. Won’t be purchasing a book through Cengage again.

Useless app. With all the money that you take from students and you can’t develop a useful app or provide a proper ebook version from the book. You don’t even deserve one star.

Would give zero if I could. The app keeps crashing every time I open my book and can’t even access the book on the online version! Worst app ever

So disappointed. So disappointed. Such a waste of time money and energy purchasing an ebook from Cengage. Nothing like a kindle or PDF. It’s basically like reading a photo. If you try to increase the size the whole page gets bigger and goes off the edge of screen. Useless to me and now have to go through the hassle of trying to get a refund. Cengage weren’t even helpful in the refund process. Didn’t respond to my online request, so after a few days I called them to be told I need to read their terms and conditions as online purchases are final. I quickly got a refund however when I told them it’s illegal to have unfair and one sided t&c’s and to falsely represent the functionality of this online product.

Waste. This app literally can do nothing, none of it supposed ‘features’ work. It is a waste of resources to even bother using this

Would give 0 stars if I could. The Ebook still buffers when I flip a page even after downloading. It’s also very difficult to highlight things in the app.

Such a waste of time. The app is constantly crashing and hard to use/ navigate. Try to use the ebook reader is harder than most of the content in the book to understand. Simple solution is to just offer all of the ebook as PDFs so we don’t have to use this terrible app.

Impossible to use. It can’t link my account to uni text book through Moodle or email link. No book to read.

Imagine you at your best. All the time. Picture yourself at your sharpest and most productive. Your most alert and focused. Your most lucid, creative and confident. At work. At play. In every area of your life. Add Mind Lab Pro® v4.0 to your daily routine and uncap your true potential. Buy Now!

The Cengage Reader is poorly designed. Difficult to read on tablet. Cannot adjust text size except by zooming in page by page and page section by page section. Slows down my reading.

Crashes upon start. Broken with the latest version of iOS.

Need page numbers. You pay $100 for a required textbook and don’t even get page numbers which are assigned. Ridiculous

Inappropriately lacking app. They sure don’t like telling you what page you are on and navigation is cumbersome and sloooooow. You need to scroll back while in view options mode and hope you see a page number to know where you are in the book, and good luck figuring out how many pages are left in the chapter so you don’t have a sense of how to pace yourself. Seriously guys, pay the money and develop an intelligently designed app, this one is embarrassingly lacking in any kind of design with your clientele’s ease of reading in mind. Also the app had a fatal crash this morning and despite rebooting a few times I needed to uninstall and reinstall it to get studying. Think maybe it’s a little counterintuitive getting in the way of your paying readers study?!

Split Screen. Can you guys implement support for split screen please? Would be useful to take notes while reading. [Cengage (left), Notability (Right)]

App must have feature parity with website. Quizzes, textbook access and flash cards (if applicable) are the primary reasons a student will actually use this app. This doesn’t support quizzes - a MUST. Book experience does not meet Apple human interface guidelines - can’t expand pictures by tapping or interact with exercises. Could do Apple Books migration?

So far so good. This app is the reason I can’t use I forgot my textbook as an excuse 👍🏽😂 I procrastinate less because of this

Un-useable. App just crashes upon start. Using iPad Pro with latest software. App is trash like Cengage and their restrictive textbook hosting :(

Great!!!!!. Amazing! It’s the best educational app I have ever used!

Useless. Not able to use on iPad

Highlighting doesn’t work properly. I bought the e-book so I could use the highlighting function. It does not work and does not recognize the correct area I am trying to select and highlight. It always goes to the top right corner of my page. Very frustrating.

Skipping sentences. I would appreciate if you can fix the issue whereas when the speaker reads the text she seems to skip sentences. Thanks!

Piece of $@#%. It's finicky at best. Dictionary function does not work most of the time, index doesn't work properly, and it interferes with the music app and shuts it down so I can't listen to the music while I read. Awful.

Great but it could use some improvement. Love the app, only issues are the page numbers missing, the out loud reader that skips sentences randomly and the fact that some images sometimes do not load properly for my screen size. Otherwise, it’s great!

Procrastinating less. I really love this app and it’s allowing me to study on the go! No issues or blips but the voice reader is quite annoying and could really use an update from the robot.

Can’t access my textbook through the app.. Garbage platform.

Absolutely useless. This app is incredibly slow, glitchy, and unintuitive. It takes ridiculous amounts of time to load a page, and chapters aren’t even broken into sections, you have to scroll down through one insanely long for each chapter that glitches and refuses to load if you scroll with any speed above a slow crawl, and tends to skip right back to the beginning for no apparent reason. One would think that with the ridiculous prices they charge for ebooks, they could hire app designers that are even somewhat competent. If you hope to use any Nelson textbook to learn, buy a hard copy or find a PDF copy online, they do not deserve your hard earned money for a service they have clearly put no effort into.

Pretty bad. The app is not the best. I just hope they make it better it. I need to be able to study effectively and I can’t with this app

Very good!. I loved the book and the app! I used a lot both the book and the app!

Okay for flash cards. This app is pretty slow and glitchy. For example, I’m in Spanish 1 and it’s says I’m in French 107, but shows all my work for Spanish. Kinda weird. Also takes a while to load a page after I click on it. Flash cards seem to work okay so far.

Pretty trash. Very slow, and right during exam season the app no longer works and continues to crash. The one time of the year I need the 140$ text book rental that I paid for I can’t use it. Rad

Videos to demonstrate. I wish there were videos or animation to describe and demonstrate the concept and brain processes.

Not bad. I use it and like it although I think it could have more graphics and visual aids. Also I can’t figure out why the quiz gives the answer every time in the actual question. Defeats the purpose of a quiz!

Garbage. Absolute garbage app, half the words on my page are cut despite what size I set The text font… I just can’t read 1/2 the page. I also can’t Swipe to go to the next page… just the next section, that cuts off multiple paragraphs of the reading. This was devolved for school use? Devs should be embarrassed.

App is crashing. App is not even working

App Crashing Upon Opening. I needed to use a textbook that I purchased for school, and of course this app isn’t even opening it. Thanks for considering student learning and time!

Feels worse than an old web browser. Usually, when I skip ahead or back in the book, it takes the app so long to load and display the supposedly offline textbook pages that I have time to find what I want from the web while I wait. I appreciate how nicely organized the material can be through this platform compared to fixed-layout ebook readers, but there's so much room for improvement on speed and reliability of the dynamic layout content viewer this app uses to display "eTexts" (like the first-year university textbook I'm required to use for math).

Good but needs fixing. I like the app, however, it keeps crashing and now once I try open it it closes right it away.

Don’t waste your time or money. I recently purchased my first e-book through Cengage as I wanted to utilize the “read to me” option. The app and the website have significant technical issues. I emailed support requesting a refund as I would rather read the physical book then on a screen. Not only were they slow to respond, they also would not provide a refund. Due to buying the e-book at the end of July and not starting the course (or using the e-book) until September. In addition, I now have to do a case study for school and the e-book doesn’t have it included. Yet my classmates have confirmed the physical copy does.

Poorly-designed app. My main beefs with this app is that there are no page numbers to correspond with assigned readings, and closing the app for a minute causes you to lose your place in the book. These are easily fixable. The 3 stars flow from decent navigation and quick loading.

Does not work well with mobile app. I’ve read an entire textbook chapter through the ebook on my iPad and noticed it is not synced in to the actual Cengage website, therefore everything that I’ve highlighted and wrote notes on is gone and can only be viewed using Cengage mobile app. The Cengage mobile app does not allow you to view and have access to the activities and exercises. You actually need to use a laptop/computer and go on the website which is very unfortunate considering that this app is supposed to help students study/learn remotely without having to use a laptop/computer. The Cengage mobile app needs more improvement, as well as updates that is user friendly when using phones and tablets.

Slow. It was working perfectly fine before, not it’s just lagging. I don’t know if this is a new update or change, but it’s extremely slow and that’s frustrating because I’m trying to learn!!!

A SCAM. I paid lots of money for a textbook for a program that barely works

Horrible.. Can’t believe I had to pay money for a digital textbook just to access quizzes online when my university has a perfectly good online system to do quizzes on. Hated reading the textbook digitally so much I had to buy a hard copy. More money for you guys 🙄 hope you’re happy because i’m not.

Useful as text book. It doesn’t allow us to make home work and assignments by mobile! Since it’s not everyone that has access to a computer it makes hard to complete exercises and get marks. It’s useful for study cards and contents.

app does not work properly in iphone. medical terminology on vocabulary abbbreviations and word elements only shows the first page, the second third and so on shows blank… wierd coz with ipad it works fine but with iphone app it doesn’t work properly… copy of the book pages does not resemble the actual text book print which is hard when doing a research and referencing the book with the pages as it does not show the actual page on the book.. very bad formatting and incomplete! not even index and glossary and appendices are not here! useless! virtualsource bookshelf is a way better playform! what a waste of money on this ebook playform!

Plz！Pay some student for some legit improvment. this app needs significant guide service for its users. And it never matches the PC interfaces

Scammers. paid 100 dollars just for “test prep.” I already have the physical text book. All that’s been provided is the e text book which I didn’t want and flash cards. The flash cards do not help at all and they are severely limited with each section. This is not worth anything over 5 dollars. Provides nothing more valuable than anything that’s been given by the physical text book and will probably not be given a refund. Disgusting

It seem’s fine?. I read the other feedbacks but It seems fine to me? None of the problems mentioned by others occurred to me. Seems fine and dandy.

Good. Good

Crashing. This app is crashing just when I need my ebook. Please fix it.

App is Crashing & No sync to online site. This app has a lot of potential but is lacking. For the last week it will not open - just crashes instead. If you highlight something on the app and open up the web browser textbook, your highlights will NOT transfer over. A hack for this is to use a MacBook and download the iPad app so you can see your highlighted notes. However at this time the app is not working across Apple OS.

Awful. I normally don’t leave reviews but this time I have to because this app is a complete trash. I’m sorry for harsh words but reading textbook on it is a misery. I would give 0 if I could.

Is this a joke ?. I just lost every single note and highlight because of an update 5 days before my exam. Are you kidding me ?

Good, can improve. I like the app. I only wish that it would be easier to search, like toggle between the items that have the results and wish for man’s voice to read the info.

Just use your physical textbook.. Close the App for a second and lose your spot in the book. Why wouldn’t it just load to where you last were? Might as well just haul around your physical copy of the text book with a book mark! Come on you can do better! Scrolling is slow and if you accidentally scroll left or right it moves you to the next or previous chapter and you lose the spot where you were. Very frustrating especially if you’re near the end of a chapter because you’ll be scrolling for days.

I can’t believe this costs real money. At least a physical textbook has some worth. I’m basically renting an glorified e-book with the added bonus of features such as flash cards and quizzes that wouldn’t be useful even if they weren’t barely functional. I would rather just do these myself if I wanted to. I was at least excited to be able to listen to my textbook with the text to speech feature when reading was Unfortunately, it’s super low quality, and can barely differentiate between genuinely useful text and random sub-headings under figures. It’s barely understandable, and can’t even pronounce many basic words properly and to make things worse, the buttons have dramatic input delay at best or just fail to execute commands without restarting the app at worst. I would much rather just copy and paste from a pdf into a third party text to speech online because at least I’m not paying for that and it essentially has the same quality and functionality. What a disappointing, lazy, waste of time cash grab. This epitomizes the practice of praying on vulnerable students with needlessly expensive, sub par services and materials. It’s pathetic at best and predatory at worst. With how much I’m being forced to pay for these materials, it shouldn’t be out of the question to expect at least a pittance of functionality and worth.

Can’t open book. I cant even open my textbook that I paid almost 40 dollars worth.

Crashes. I use this app to view my textbook during open book quizzes and constantly have to rush to reset it because it crashes multiple times in the span of a thirty minute quiz. Garbage.

Inconvenient. Flash card quizzes have the answer already in the question. This makes it useless for active recall studying. Highlighter needs to be fixed, when trying to highlight a sentence it highlights the whole paragraph instead. Also the fact that we have to select the part we want to highlight first and then select the highlight option takes too long. We should be able to write on the page directly. This is super inconvenient and we as students aren’t getting what we paid for.

Adsterra is the most preferred ad network for those looking for an alternative to AdSense. Adsterra is the ideal choice for new sites with low daily traffic. In order to advertise on the site in Adsterra, like other ad networks, a certain traffic limit, domain age, etc. is required. There are no strict rules. Sign up!