Audio
The audio is awful. It sounds robotic and is hard to listen to.
Great app
Only con is I don’t like the voices given and they read all of the information even when I turn off descriptive reading
Nice app
It’s a nic3 app
Almost perfect.
Pretty good app. My only gripe, which is significant, is that there is not, at least that I know of, any way to have multiple accounts on a single device, which makes switching between my school and personal accounts pretty annoying.
Poor navigation
Very poor navigation, and outdated in general
Crashing
Newest update keeps instantly crashing whenever I try to open it on my iPhone, I need this for drug dosages for my job so this is extremely inconvenient!!
Glitched out functions
If you are using an iPad with a pencil, good luck getting it to highlight without stuttering and jumping pages. Not intuitive at all. Simple PDF files are more responsive and don’t glitch out at every single attempt to highlight or remove highlights.
Syncing issues
Not syncing across devices. Missing books among devices with same login. Highlights from my texts are missing in one book and present in others.
Very poorly made
I had 50+ flash cards that were one-sided and this app decided they weren't worth saving and DELETED ALL OF THEM. I can't even recover them on my computer. 👎👎👎
Biopsychology
There is no way enlarge print. Cannot use more than one device at a time. One must sign out of your phone to use the iPad. Also not compatible with Kindle,which has a much more useable interface.
Don’t work for IOS
The app crashed upon open in IOS
A bit clunky on iPadOS
With the Magic Keyboard case attached, it’s clunky to move through pages in this app. I often have to move back to the sidebar to move onto a new section instead of just swiping or pressing an arrow key to move on.
Doesn’t save place in book
Solidly okay, but doesn’t save place in book so half the time when you get off task you have to faff around to get back to correct spot
App keeps Closing
Application keeps closed after trying to open it. Theres No update but bugs need to be fixed.
Used to be good — now missing a core feature
I’ve used Bookshelf for studying my VitalSource textbooks and honestly it was a solid 4-star app. Reading, organizing, syncing across devices — all worked well.
But version 11.4 removed stylus/Apple Pencil annotation support. For a lot of us, marking up textbooks — highlighting and writing notes directly on the page — isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the entire point of using an iPad for studying instead of a laptop. Calling this a “reliability improvement” doesn’t change the fact that it guts the app’s usefulness for anyone who studies this way.
I get that bugs happen, but removing the feature instead of fixing it is a bad trade for your users. Please bring Pencil annotation back. Until then, I’m actively looking for alternatives, and I’d guess a lot of other nursing/med/grad students relying on this for coursework are doing the same.
But version 11.4 removed stylus/Apple Pencil annotation support. For a lot of us, marking up textbooks — highlighting and writing notes directly on the page — isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the entire point of using an iPad for studying instead of a laptop. Calling this a “reliability improvement” doesn’t change the fact that it guts the app’s usefulness for anyone who studies this way.
I get that bugs happen, but removing the feature instead of fixing it is a bad trade for your users. Please bring Pencil annotation back. Until then, I’m actively looking for alternatives, and I’d guess a lot of other nursing/med/grad students relying on this for coursework are doing the same.
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Latest update is broken
I have an iPhone with the latest iOS update and now with the last update of this app, it won’t open.
Not the worst
This app gives the books you need and works decently enough. However, this was proprietary to the textbook I needed to read and I would much prefer a different reader. Additionally, the read aloud feature is what I would expect from technology made 20 years ago. There’s no reason they can’t have better voice options today. Naturally, they make it impossible to export as an EPUB or PDF because they want you to use their app and not share those files with others, but that punishes those of us who just want our own digital content delivered in a better format. I do not plan to continue using this after the semester.
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Almost great
It’s user friendly and easy to highlight with an Apple Pencil on the iPad. I dislike the jump to next feature on the iPhone when Im trying to quickly scroll through pages. The feature lands on the screen where my thumb scrolls downward and upward (especially if I’m using it one handed) and I end up pressing it by accident.
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Worst!
There is a frustrating bug in the current version. When dealing with books that have small fonts, I need to pinch-to-zoom to read the lines properly. Unfortunately, once zoomed in, the markup feature stops working, preventing me from highlighting or annotating important words. I have to zoom back out to use markup, but then the text is too small to see what I'm highlighting. Please fix this conflict between zoom and markup!
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Unusable in its current state
I appreciate there is an app that makes it easier to access academic books digitally. But there are some aspects that *must* be fixed because the app is practically unusable right now! At least on iPad. The main two issues are:
1. Any time I interact with the book I am reading, it will skip ahead around 10 pages from where I was. Whether it be from highlighting, trying to bookmark a page, tapping the center to remove the peripheral menu, or sometimes just scrolling as usual, this happens so often that I have considered just getting the physical book to avoid this nonsense.
2. There needs to be similar options to customize and move through the book like with Kindle. The three options to get through the book are to scroll, a paginated swipe, or chapter scroll. Even with the paginated system, I have to actually swipe to change the page every time? I can’t just tap on the right or left of the screen to move forward or back, which aces no sense to me. Every other ereader app does this.
As for nice-to-haves, I would appreciate being able to write in the margins to take notes while I read the text. But the two issue above need to be addressed before I can even consider using this app for law school.
1. Any time I interact with the book I am reading, it will skip ahead around 10 pages from where I was. Whether it be from highlighting, trying to bookmark a page, tapping the center to remove the peripheral menu, or sometimes just scrolling as usual, this happens so often that I have considered just getting the physical book to avoid this nonsense.
2. There needs to be similar options to customize and move through the book like with Kindle. The three options to get through the book are to scroll, a paginated swipe, or chapter scroll. Even with the paginated system, I have to actually swipe to change the page every time? I can’t just tap on the right or left of the screen to move forward or back, which aces no sense to me. Every other ereader app does this.
As for nice-to-haves, I would appreciate being able to write in the margins to take notes while I read the text. But the two issue above need to be addressed before I can even consider using this app for law school.
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