Cengage Read User Reviews

Customer Experience

Positive experience19.6% of reviews
Neutral8.8% of reviews
Negative experience71.6% of reviews

~ Based on 250 written reviews from the US App Store.

What users say

Is Cengage Read Safe?

Cengage Read appears mostly safe based on user ratings. AppsHunter Safety Score for Cengage Read is 84/100.

This assessment is based on 3,904 user ratings, with an App Store average of 4.2/5.

Safety Analysis

80.0% of ratings point to a safe experience
4.4% of ratings suggest some concerns
15.7% of ratings point to a risky experience

~ Based on 3,904 App Store ratings for Cengage Read.

Is Cengage Read Legit?

Cengage Read appears to be a legitimate app. AppsHunter Legitimacy Score for Cengage Read is 90/100.

Based on 90 of 100 points across 7 verification signals from App Store and developer data.

Top reviews

Review

Great app, an improvement would be the ability to copy text while within the mobile app. Otherwise I like that I can have offline access.

Waste of time

How can you not initiate the read aloud from the text or page you left off, it starts all over … maybe i want to relisten to a certain section… nope can’t do that. What a trash app considering i have unlimited.

Improvements made but not perfect

Will sometimes glitch and highlighting won’t work or some pages won’t allow highlighting at all which means you can’t save notes either. Really hate that it won’t allow you to copy. Would be convenient to enable that feature so learner can copy and paste questions into search engine for further research.
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Do it

Down load it. Saves so much time and very interactive and no they didn’t pay me for this review

Terrible app

Won’t let me see my books ordered through here on my phone

Constantly Freezes

Decent e-reader app but freezes constantly and the search feature is helpful but doesn’t find all the matches and then you have to manually swipe around to search on your own. Love that I can highlight things though.

Best for Reading Only

This app is best when you only want to READ your textbooks on your phone or tablet.

The text to speech is very robotic and frequently glitches, sometimes not even loading between pages. I often have to refresh just to keep it working. And the basic features like highlighting and taking notes are not user friendly.
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Unclear purchases

When purchasing a book, it makes it extremely unclear what exactly you’re buying. It’s so ridiculous that when I called customer service they were also unclear on what I bought and how I ended up not having e-book access. It ended up resolving itself with no help from customer service. I pray to God I don’t have to buy another book through these guys.
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Glitches galore

Cengage is used in my graduate program and I thought the app would be helpful when I’m away from my desktop. It doesn’t work 90% or more of the time. On startup, an “Error” message pops up. The app will not load my textbooks on the dashboard and pops up with the same error message. The same message also happens every time I hit the refresh button.

If a miracle happens and the textbooks DO appear on my dashboard, good luck getting them to download. More often than not, it freezes trying to download and will not be fixed by restarting the app completely.

Sometimes these issues are fixed by logging out and logging back in, but for the majority of the time, it doesn’t work even after doing that. It is the least useful app I’ve ever tried to use. Not to mention it almost never gets updated.

At this point, I can only access my books from a web browser, so if I’m ever without service or internet, I won’t be able to read the textbooks. Wish this app would work better because it could be so good!
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Managing Human Resource

This experience would be SO MUCH BETTER if the audio was synchronized to the text to flow as natural reading and in different voices.

Great accessibility

I can log in from both of my devices on the mobile app depending on what I’m doing. I love that I can seamlessly listen to my textbooks without having to bring my laptop everywhere to access the website. This is honestly making online college textbook reading a breeze now that I found the app!

Citing

This app makes it very difficult to cite any pages. You are unable to check which page you are on and you cannot easily navigate through the book. It seems that the pages are separated by subject matter rather than book pages. I think I would have a real book, or Vital Bookshelf. The school uses Cengage.
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Mind tap

Really wish there was a way to do the mind tap simulations on the app!! Would make school on the go so much easier!!!

Thank you

This app is awesome I use it often because it helps me to study.

Would it be possible?

I just wish I was able to play some of the videos that are shown in the textbook online via the app if I’m away from my computer and or laptop. (Overall good experience)

Thank you

This app is awesome, I use it often .

Niko

I like that we can listen while we work or do things the course reading. I’m not a great reader and this really helps.

Poor multi-tasking support

I have this app on my iPad. It bugs out heavily when I go into windowed mode. What I want to do is to have my textbook up on one half of the screen, with my notes app on the other half. What ends up happening is that the book pages either spazz out, or my Goodnotes or Microsoft word app gets shoved away. I’m unsure if it is a deliberate design choice, or if the app is just unoptimized. Either way, it is incredibly frustrating.
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Awesome!

Love it!

Frozen and no developer response

When you’re busy studying and doing your assigned readings, the last thing you want to worry about is an e-textbook app glitching. The footnotes are frozen, there is no way to export notes, or combine highlighted texts or anything like that. When companies take over textbooks and then make them hundreds of dollars in an effort to encourage people to use their app or their e-readers, one hopes that the alternative functions well. It does what it needs to do, which is allow users to read their textbooks, that the users can do what they need to do, which is complete assignments, look up texts, references material. But this app and Cengage can’t seem to meet that standard to just work. It just doesn’t work often enough to make this a good option. Cengage charges how much for textbooks? Yet, can’t create an app that works most of the time. EDIT: I just went down and read the reviews, and there are barely any developer responses to glitches, bugs, user experiences problems and app issues. Way to be on it Cengage.
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