# Bookshelf — user reviews > 502 indexed App Store user reviews of Bookshelf by VitalSource Technologies, Inc., rated 4.70/5 from 78,432 ratings. - Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/bookshelf/id389359495/reviews - App overview in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/bookshelf/id389359495.md - Rating breakdown: 5★ 65,610 · 4★ 6,227 · 3★ 2,201 · 2★ 1,090 · 1★ 3,304 ## What do users think of Bookshelf? Overall sentiment: neutral **Pros** - 📚 Convenient access to textbooks - 🔍 Useful search functionality - 📚 Offline reading capability - 🔖 Bookmark and note-taking features - 🔊 Text-to-speech option **Cons** - 🐛 Buggy highlighting and annotation tools - 🖋️ Lack of Apple Pencil support - 📚 Restricted functionality compared to other e-book apps - 🔍 Inconsistent search and navigation experience - 🔋 High battery consumption - 🤖 Poor text-to-speech quality **Commonly reported bugs** - Frequent crashes and freezes - Issues with page loading and scrolling - Inconsistent behavior when switching between devices - Unreliable text-to-speech functionality **Most requested features** - Improved highlighting and annotation tools - Apple Pencil support for note-taking - More customization options (e.g., font, layout, night mode) - Seamless cross-device synchronization - Enhanced search and navigation features ## Newest reviews (18 of 502) ### 3/5 — Audio *2026-08-21, version 11.4.1* The audio is awful. It sounds robotic and is hard to listen to. ### 4/5 — Great app *2026-08-19, version 11.4.1* Only con is I don’t like the voices given and they read all of the information even when I turn off descriptive reading ### 4/5 — Nice app *2026-08-19, version 11.4.1* It’s a nic3 app ### 4/5 — Almost perfect. *2026-08-18, version 11.4.1* 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. ### 2/5 — Poor navigation *2026-08-15, version 11.4.1* Very poor navigation, and outdated in general ### 3/5 — A bit clunky on iPadOS *2026-07-26, version 11.4* With the Magic Keyboard case attached, it’s clunky to move through pages in this app.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. ### 3/5 — Doesn’t save place in book *2026-07-25, version 11.4* 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 ### 2/5 — App keeps Closing *2026-07-22, version 11.4* Application keeps closed after trying to open it. Theres No update but bugs need to be fixed. ### 3/5 — Not the worst *2026-07-16, version 11.4* 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. ### 4/5 — Almost great *2026-07-16, version 11.4* 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. ### 1/5 — Can’t annotate or screenshot *2026-07-03, version 11.3.2* You can’t do handwritten annotations and if you try to screenshot a section to put in in a different t notes app, you can't. You're better off just buying the print version of a book. ### 1/5 — Not for people who need accommodations *2026-07-02, version 11.3.2* If you'd like to continually scroll, like a regular person reads from a tablet or phone (which, isn't that the point of having an app) you're not going to get what you need. As someone with dyslexia having the page reorient itself every time you touch or remove your finger from the screen isn't only frustrating it makes it impossible to refer to the previous page without completely reorienting. I'm a grad student, I don't have time for this mess and a used book is better than how frustrating the page layouts are, even when they say they offer "accommodations". As a textbook peddler, they've spent very little time assessing how people naturally read. ### 3/5 — Great but not *2026-06-25, version 11.3.2* I love having this app to access all my textbooks on the go. However, being dyslexic and needing a good “read aloud” option (critical in order to retain information). The read aloud on this app it like talking to WALLI… extremely robotic with no option to change it to any other more natural sounding voice. Very frustrating since I can’t understand some of what the robot is trying to read. ### 1/5 — Stay away *2026-06-24, version 11.3.2* Absolute cancer of an app. One of the worst UI I have seen in a while and you are only renting books you can’t print chapter of. Full on scam. All these 5 star must be bots. No one who reads a lot can enjoy this drudgery. ### 1/5 — Don’t have text to speech *2026-06-24, version 11.3.2* Not helping at all ### 3/5 — Sufficient *2026-06-16, version 11.3.2* A little glitchy on some pages and not user-friendly for reading, but sufficient I guess ### 3/5 — I just want to learn man *2026-06-15, version 11.3.2* I’m trying to read my calculus textbook but some formulas just don’t show up in the text! Trying to get help is a nightmare. How am I supposed to pass this class when I can’t even read the textbook because some text just refuses to show up? If I can email someone, that would be sweet. ### 2/5 — Terrible Read Aloud Voice *2026-06-14, version 11.3.2* I use the app and pay for the ebooks specifically for the read aloud option and the robot voice is terrible. Is there really no other voice option? Hopefully they adjust that asap bc I've spent the $$$. On the website, vital source, there are other voice options, but not in the Bookshelf app apparently. Boo. ## Most critical reviews (10 lowest-rated) ### 1/5 — Crashing *2026-08-14, version 11.4.1* 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!! ### 1/5 — Glitched out functions *2026-08-09, version 11.4.1* 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. ### 1/5 — Syncing issues *2026-08-08, version 11.4.1* Not syncing across devices. Missing books among devices with same login. Highlights from my texts are missing in one book and present in others. ### 1/5 — Very poorly made *2026-08-06, version 11.4.1* 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. 👎👎👎 ### 1/5 — Biopsychology *2026-08-02, version 11.4.1* 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. ### 1/5 — Don’t work for IOS *2026-07-27, version 11.4* The app crashed upon open in IOS ### 1/5 — Used to be good — now missing a core feature *2026-07-20, version 11.4* 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. ### 1/5 — Latest update is broken *2026-07-19, version 11.4* I have an iPhone with the latest iOS update and now with the last update of this app, it won’t open. ### 1/5 — Worst! *2026-07-11, version 11.3.2* 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! ### 1/5 — Unusable in its current state *2026-07-10, version 11.3.2* 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. ## Most praised reviews (10 highest-rated) ### 5/5 — AI Voices *2026-07-07, version 11.3.2* I just start taking courses again and am enjoying the ai feature very much. Hopefully it will be made for all books soon ### 5/5 — AI Reader *2026-06-23, version 11.3.2* Love the new AI reader voice. So much easier to listen to and tolerate boring text books. Only downside is it doesn’t work for all books yet. So I have one textbook that is great, and the other having the old robot voices… Really hoping it can be applied to all of them very soon!! Also hoping one day it can be smart enough (or have the option) to skip things like “Figure 16.45” and the (citations) that are at the end of the sentences. ### 5/5 — Needs to integrate speechify *2026-06-03, version 11.3.2* Needs to integrate speechify ### 5/5 — User friendly *2026-05-03, version 11.3.2* User friendly, can open on all devices without skipping a page! ### 5/5 — Why don’t all universities use this?! *2026-04-08, version 11.3.2* Love all the functionalities - highlighting, taking notes, making flashcards, in-built key terms etc. ### 5/5 — Best Textbook App *2026-03-19, version 11.3.2* Love how easy it is to access textbooks. You can rent or buy the textbooks, they have reasonable prices as well! 10/10 ### 5/5 — College book *2026-03-13, version 11.3.1* I started college a few weeks ago and I had to download a book through Bookshelf. It has worked great, I can change the font size, zoom and most importantly to me is that I can choose dark theme on it. ### 5/5 — Audio voice *2026-03-07, version 11.3* I would like to improve the voice for audible ### 5/5 — Better than Texidium. *2026-03-03, version 11.3* This is a better app hands down. Nice features like highlighting and adding notes. ### 5/5 — The Hard Facts *2026-01-19, version 11.2.1* This app is very helpful. It makes reading more enjoyable and efficient to get thru the material. I love the ability to copy and paste sections and the ability to take notes --- *Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-08-29.*