Leave a Review cloudLibrary
BEST APP!
Great app for if you are looking for the best online library to use for ,long car rides, plane rides, and train rides, then this is the app for you! With its wide variety of selections, it creates the perfect substitute for a library! I really enjoy using this app for more than one reason so i am only going to rate a few. One, great tools! The bookmarks and start from where you left off on the other device are great tools! Two, you can download books to use whenever you aren’t connected to the internet. Three, they have audio versions of the majority of the books and that is great because for some people, they get nauseous whenever they read in the car or plane. So the audio is great for that too. Or if you just don’t want to read then you can use the audio version. Defiantly recommend this app if you are wanting an online free library. You do have to connect it to the local library and usually you just call them up and they have the majority of the US library’s listed so it should be fairly easy to find yours. The main glitches that i have found or experienced are fairly mild and tend to be the result of not enough storage so if you have already downloaded this app and are currently having trouble you might have to delete the app and redownload it. And trust me, that has never happened before and it won’t take long. Defiantly five star review!!!Show lessWylie baker
Libby is Better
My local library announced they are moving from Libby to CloudLibrary. I’ve been using Libby for 4 years and luckily I can still use it with a second library card I have because it’s far superior to CloudLibrary. I use it almost exclusively for audiobooks though I have borrowed an ebook or two. So here’s what I’ve learned trying to use CloudLibrary that Libby does exponentially better: 1. The search feature. Not only is is super fast, but it isn’t stingy on what you can and cannot type in the search box. 2. As you’re reading, Libby tells you what your progress is as a percentage. So when I’m updating my reading trackers it’s a simple task. With CL you have to calculate your own progress. 3. Libby lets you tag books. I can have multiple wish lists, tag whether I liked a book or not, etc. your CL lists are Saved, Holds, Borrowed. Super helpful. 4. The sleep timer in Libby has an option to stop at the end of a chapter. CL doesn’t. 5. Libby let’s you send ebooks to your Kindle. CL makes you read the ebook on your phone. Or an iPad I suppose but most use Kindle for ebooks. 6. The overall user experience and interface is just better. Feels like a modern app instead of something you would’ve seen 15 years ago. CL is dated. At this point, I will now use my secondary library exclusively. CL is too frustrating and clunky. It has a loooooong way to go before it becomes a contender for a Libby alternative.Show lessilkjen
Thoughts
I recently had a situation where the books on AI that I had saved to download were not available and the Auburn Maine library could do nothing about helping me.
In all fairness I think quite highly of the Cloud library and wanted to let you know the following: It would be nice books would be available sooner. Particularly, nonfiction. Many of the books, particularly the technical nonfiction books are in smaller print which is more difficult to read, particularly for an older person. I really like to read the books on electronic devices because the print can be increased in size, back lighted, listened to as well as read and displayed on a TV screen that is really excellent when you want to exercise on an stationary bike or elliptical. The ability to read, listen and copy specific memorable phrases or sentences help enable the memorization of certain facts. I would like to see an approach with the cloud reader similar to the samples offered in the Kindle software. I usually same a book on the Kindle and then download it using the Cloud Library. I can’t afford to pay for all of the Kindle versions or I would probably do that. Anyway, I love the Cloud Library and think that the Auburn Library does an excellent job of selecting newer books. Appreciate much. Regards, Terry JohnsonShow lessmurry1898
There’s something wrong with the app and I can’t get any help from the library
I see a book I want to download but instead of the green borrow tab, there’s a yellow one that says “suggest “ instead. Sometimes another day it’s available but before I can make room to borrow it, it’s gone back to the yellow suggest tab and I can’t have it.
The most frustrating thing about this app is often when there’s a series, say 5 books each following interconnected characters, not all the books will be available to borrow.
Recently, I tried to read a 6 book series. Books 1, 2 & 3 were available but 4 & 5 were not. The last one, number 6 was there but it’s like trying to watch a movie with just the beginning and end but no middle! It’s ludicrous and frustrating.
These are just a couple of problems. There’s more and I’ve contacted my library, but nobody got back to me as promised. I called them last week when I was having trouble and was told I had too many books checked out because the limit was 4. If you know anything about the app, the checkout limit is 5! How can the library personnel not know something that basic and if they don’t know that, how can they help me with complicated issues?Show lessCandlefan
Endlessly frustrating
I previously said the app was barely acceptable and gave it two stars. But the more I’ve used it the worse it gets. I now give it 1 star and would give it zero stars if I could. It frequently has the extremely annoying habit of opening to the first page of a chapter or several pages before the point I left off rather than the page on which I left off, forcing me to page through the chapter to find my place. This requires me to highlight a portion of the last text I read or bookmark the page to ease finding my place. To make matters worse, when clicking on highlighted text to delete the highlighting, the trash can icon, which is black, is invisible when the iPad is in night mode because the background of the trash icon is also black. If the highlighted text is at the very top of the screen, it is impossible to delete the highlighting until you change to scroll mode and move the highlighted text away from the top. Also, occasionally turning pages (back or forth) jumps several pages rather than just one. Changing between portrait and landscape mode screws up pagination.Show lessBen Cumberbatch
Great app! Feature request?
Overall, this is a terrific app for accessing electronic resources (I use it primarily for audiobooks) available from my local library. Even works well remembering where I left off across multiple devices. Kudos on the app, mostly. Couple of things. Possibly feature requests? 1) Please add to the sleep timer on audio books an ‘End of Chapter’ option. It’s nice to leave off at a chapter rather than just a specific amount of time. As it stands now I have to dive into the chapter list and figure out how much time is left in the chapter and then try and peg it just right at the right time in the sleep timer to be approximately at chapter end. To the end user, there is no reason I shouldn’t also have an end of chapter option. 2) How about a bug report / feature request button in the app itself. There is no way that I can find to report bugs or request enhancements except by writing a review. Plenty of FAQs and the like, but if I can’t find it there, then no other way to communicate with development team that I can tell. Thank you!Show lessJim Maier
Thank you times a million!
My old car had a CD player. I checked out audiobooks from the library all the time for long commutes and visits to friends in other states. After a while, I noticed my options were dwindling.
When I got a new car, it didn’t have a CD player. I freaked out and bought a portable one so I could listen to my audiobooks. Then, I learned about Cloud Library. It’s amazing!! The selections are endless, including new releases. I just check out and download a book through the app on my phone, and it plays in my car! I don’t have to worry about changing CDs or remembering where I left off. It’s all right here on my phone! Sometimes I even listen when I’m not driving.
Listening to audio books allows me to double or even triple the number of books I consume. The fact that I can listen for free with my library card is amazing. I’m so so grateful for Cloud Library and for all my local Columbia County (Florida) library branches and the wonderful people who work in them. (Special shoutout to the Ft. White branch. That place feels like home when I walk in.)Show lessViolett 💜🦚
Eh…almost better than nothing
Updated to remove a star, leaving one single star as the rating. I cannot stand this app. It’s garbage. The 4.7 rating is bull and clearly fabricated if you actually look at the five star reviews. Tonight the book blurbs won’t load, nor am I even able to borrow or save any books based on cover/title alone as the borrow and save buttons have completely disappeared. This app is a piece of hot, stinking, mid-summer, humid day, full of rotten meat garbage.
Much prefer Libby to Cloud Library. The functionality here is severely lacking. Interface feels outdated and is missing basic things like being able to see that I already checked a book out either from the list when searching or on the details page once you click in to read the blurb about the book. If I hadn’t moved and been forced to use this app instead of Libby by my local library I never would have changed. Wish I could go back to Libby, so much so in fact I’ve started researching where the nearest library that uses Libby is so I can go there to see if I can somehow pay for a guest card or something. Not to mention the catalog of books is much more limited, not sure if that’s my library system’s issue or the app’s issue, but it’s very noticeable. Two stars because something is better than nothing, but there’s a lot of room for improvement here.Show lessAnnoyedwithautoplay
Island of the Blue Dolphins, by Scott O’Dell
I teach English Language Arts to students in the 4th grade of life. The reading theme, this lesson series, just happens to be about survival. O’Dell’s award winning novel of the coming from school age to a strong resilient young lady, “Kranna;”that was left on an island off the Santa Barbara coast of California to fend for herself is incredible! This Is truly a realistic nonfiction account that has my public charter students, in their own urban insular enthralled in reading a book.
Sharing that if we can survive like Kranna nothing can stop us. CBS, 60 minutes, grants my class a text to text (media) reading comprehension connection. Finally what’s your island of spirit animals? My wife’s would be giraffes, she loves them. Mine are whales. Whenever I’m taking a certification test or something I close my eyes for a second and explain the question to the whale in his habitat, the ocean, the amusement peers when the orca reply’s “what’s a question?”Show lessD. Boogie
Convenient but buggy
Update: I’m lowering my rating from 3 stars to 2 because I see that the issue I complained about previously has still not been fixed.
When I am scrolling from page to page through a chapter, the book will suddenly scroll forward several pages, like to the end of a chapter even though I have ten pages still left to read before the next chapter. I described the same problem below, and it still hasn’t been fixed. This is really annoying!!!
I have been using CloudLibrary for a few years now, and I was pretty satisfied with it until the latest update a few months ago. When you turned the page in the previous version, it actually looked like a page turning, like on a Kindle, and I really liked that feature. Now it just changes from one screen to another, pretty boring. Far, far worse than that, however, is the way the app randomly skips pages when I am turning a page. I will turn from, say, page 22 to page 23, and all of a sudden, I am on page 35 for no apparent reason. Then, I have to go back and search for the page I was actually on. This keeps happening no matter what book I read. I truly appreciate the convenience of being able to read books for free whenever I want to through my library’s subscription to CloudLibrary, but this weird bug is basically the only reason I am leaving this review. I wish it would be fixed.Show lessGusano de Libros
