OK but out of date and not well implemented
This app is fine; it allows reading textbooks. But it’s clunky and feels out of date. The windowing is not really compatible with iPadOS 26, not filling the screen and resizing itself awkwardly. Scrolling between pages is awkward. When I leave the app it forgets which page I was on, so I have to find the page again. All in all disappointing.
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Response from developer
Thank you for the review. We are sorry to hear that you are not happy with the experience you have been getting from the Cambridge Spiral application. Please us the "Contact Us" button on the application itself to discuss your issue with one of our support agents.
Worse than Nothing
As others notice, this proprietary app has no purpose other than frustrating any attempt to use it. Bad on a laptop, worse on an iPad. We recommend using you own PDF screenshots, which won’t need a 5 second delay to load per page. Making notes is a multi step process nobody wants. Cambridge seems to underestimate the capabilities of every user to bypass its authoritarian corporate barriers. Here’s an example of a corporation doing something sleazy to save a penny and ruin its entire lineup of products. Authors beware of publishing with Cambridge.
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Please let me use a proper e-reader instead
Make no mistake, this app exists not to satisfy user needs but so your access to textbooks can be managed (and withdrawn after you leave education). Which would be disappointing even were the app of good quality. It is not. It is dismal. No dark mode, not even the most rudimentary controls over reading - font, line spacing, alignment. Really feels phoned in. A bare minimum. The experience is so much worse than either Books or Kindle - neither of which, frankly, sets a high bar - it is shamerful.
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Useless
Cambridge is meant to be home of the smartest people in this country and they cant even make an app that works properly 🤬
frustrating to use
When I click to borrow a title, it redirects me to the App Store to download the app instead of taking me to the app itself which is already installed on my phone. So then I click open and it opens the app but just gets stuck on a page saying “Redirecting”.
App
Good app, works well
Be better, Cambridge
I don’t think a reader can be worse than this. Massively frustrating to use. Thanks for nothing, guys.
Featureless and Horrible
This reader doesn’t have any basic functions or features that the most basic readers have. The text to speech option is absolutely horrible. Go back to the drawing board and develop a better app! It’s absolutely pathetic that we have to use this for school.
Awful new in-housed ebook reader
Cambridge University Press switched from a perfectly decent third-party ebook reader that they used for the previous edition of a textbook I teach from to this app for the new edition (a racket in itself, of course). This reader doesn’t support the most basic features of an ebook reader or an iPad app. It appears to have no support for iPad multitasking, so I can’t have my notetaking app or the app I work problems in up while reading the book. The text rendering is incredibly ugly, especially for equations, rather than using the typesetting in the paper version of the textbook. This is the worst of all worlds, especially given that they used the perfectly decent Bookshelf by VitalSource for previous editions. A serious downgrade — though of course now they won’t sell the old edition of the textbook that uses the much-better reader.
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Awful, awful, awful
This is a horrifyingly bad eReader. I cannot believe Cambridge University Press produced such a poor piece of software. On an iPad, you can only read in landscape orientation, and each chapter of the book I’m reading is one long, long, long vertical scroll. The typography of the mathematics is fuzzy and ugly… it’s apparently just a bitmap. After accidentally creating a bookmark in the wrong spot, I gave up after trying fifteen times to remove it because the popup menu disappears as soon as it appears. A PDF would be 10,000% better, but CUP doesn’t care about that because this garbage reader lets them lock up the book that I paid $70 for. I will never buy another book that uses Cambridge Spiral.
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Terrible app to use
Will forcibly make you download app when trying to use ereader online but won’t let you annotate and is a clunky app. My least favourite study app I’ve ever encountered. Incredibly irritating
The lack of split screen support is criminal
Please
Good Reading App
Pros: Reading, highlighting, editing are all good and books are easy to access with Apple Pencil functionality.
Cons: Aspect ratio and resolution are not perfect on all devices.
Cons: Aspect ratio and resolution are not perfect on all devices.
