An Archaic Relic without Good Functionality
This reader is the poorest e-reader I’ve experienced, and I’m shocked that this is the best Barnes & Noble can come up with, especially for college students. I’m so disappointed, I will not rent any more books from this platform.
The TTS service is horrible
The great thing about yuzu is having the book on hand for a class. It’s great to aggregate all my reading material in one app. Now that the pros are out of the way let’s talk about the cons. The text to speech engine is an embarrassment. It is the reason I’m writing this review. It sounds like Steven hawking translator that he made in 1980. Trying to listen to it is like listening to glass on a chalkboard. The work around is opening it up on a browser to highlight and use Microsoft web TTS engine. Idk why yuzu hasn’t invested a dollar into making or licensing a better speech software. I even know students who copy and paste the book into a word document to have words TTS software to read it to them. Reading books on a screen is already difficult enough on the eyes. If you’re going to have a TTS function don’t make it sound like garbage. I don’t use this app anymore and have instead used yuzu through the browser for better functionality which is sad. I’m giving it 2 stars, bc it holds my library not bc I actually use the app
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Reader preference Custom settings
The app itself seems to work well, IF you leave the reader preferences on publisher formatting. The second you want to customize how the reading experience will be, is exactly when the app breaks down. Page scrolling locks up. App crashes, and content gets cut off. Clearly the development team isn’t unit testing on multiple platforms. If they were, they would see the UX degradation and note that an ok app turns into one of the worst on the app market.
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Great app when you have to go somewhere and you don’t want to miss out
Great app, the AI voices are pretty cool but sometimes it reminds me of the 90s Mac voices that were a hidden secret you never told anyone about until you made it talk. It’s a great app for studying the textbooks for the go. I recommend it for anyone who wants to listen to the book and follow along with a physical copy or listen for sleep like Homer and his weight loss tapes that were actually linguistics because they ran out of the weight loss tapes. If you have Barnes and noble connected to your college bookstore it’s very useful for the book
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Read-Out Loud option is a joke and spooky
The read-out loud feature is a joke. Other than that, it works like any other ebook. It’s expensive, and I’d rather just use Cengage directly.
College Use
Terrible if you want to highlight anything, or make notes because it is not user friendly on a regular phone. I only use it to read my textbooks aloud but it tweaks the screen formatting out which makes it difficult to use any other feature while it reads aloud. Please fix the missing highlight feature, and lower the audio buttons because it is in the way of the text so we can actually read the bottom of the page.
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Avoid at all costs
This app is a nightmare to use and it crashes about every 10 minutes. The voice reader is ancient and just about any other app to read books is better than this. Unfortunately, I have to use it for school. I never bother writing reviews, but this has been horrible. Avoid all costs.
Horrible App
As an older student, the pages are extremely hard to see, and the read aloud feature is very robotic and not easy to listen to long term. I’m searching for options to allow me to complete coursework, but this reader and app is not the answer. Especially for a reading intense 8-week course.
Annoying
If you're going to call your app an eReader, than it should be able to read to you in something other than a Steven Hawking voice. It's completely insufferable. Shouldn't be that complicated. Tons of apps have AI readers with more human sounding voices
Barnes & Noble College
Great system to read textbooks
Absolute trash
Absolutely a trash product and should be removed front the store
Terrible UI and coding failures
Every chapter has a series of definitions that you need to click on in order to read the definitions. the pop ups work on the website(though the layout is terrible); but on the app, the definition pop-ups are translucent meaning both layers of text are visible, making them completely unreadable. For an app that is required for my textbook it is infuriating.
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Reader needs work
The reader on this app is very choppy. It is hard to understand and listen to. I downloaded the ebook because I thought I would be able to listen to the reading while completing other tasks
Voice Reader sucks
It’s 2026, get a decent AI to do the reading. Audio is stilted and sounds like an old Macintosh computer trying to do voice overs. All other functionality is great but this is just awful.
UPDATE THE APP
last update was seven months ago, the voiceover sounds incredibly robotic, which makes people like me who read and listen at the same time have a harder time getting through the text. Please work on that so I can actually progress in my classes instead of struggling.
Worthless
Just a waste of time. Won't allow me to access what's in my library and sends me on corcles.
Serviceable
I would probably rank this as a 2.5 if I could. It’s a perfectly serviceable app but not widely enough used to apply to more than a single class in my course schedule. That’s not entirely Yuzu’s fault, just an annoyance. It’s nice to make notes on my iPad and be able to find them from my computer as I work on papers.
I would appreciate if I could access my materials more easily without being kicked out of my login. Credentials don’t work to log back in to the same window and I end up having to close mid-read and re-open the textbook through the LMS all over again. This is probably due to Okta integration, is my guess? This is difficult when I am in a particularly involved study session or I’m in the process of writing a paper. So just be warned that this may be an issue.
I would appreciate if I could access my materials more easily without being kicked out of my login. Credentials don’t work to log back in to the same window and I end up having to close mid-read and re-open the textbook through the LMS all over again. This is probably due to Okta integration, is my guess? This is difficult when I am in a particularly involved study session or I’m in the process of writing a paper. So just be warned that this may be an issue.
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Terrible
The highlighting feature is absolutely terrible for an app designed for iPad. You cannot use your Apple Pencil to write notes in the margins.
You can’t even highlight with native features, you have to use iOS’s highlight function, and then select the option to highlight from the menu that appears. This completely removes any advantage offered by hosting an app on iPad as opposed to desktop.
You can’t even highlight with native features, you have to use iOS’s highlight function, and then select the option to highlight from the menu that appears. This completely removes any advantage offered by hosting an app on iPad as opposed to desktop.
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Voice reader doesn’t even work
Voice reader doesn’t work, it just skips pages all fast and doesn’t read anything. I’m on iPad OS 26 and iPad 9th gen
E-reader is lacking
The e-reader read aloud feature is horrible for a time where AI is leading compared to other read aloud platforms.
