Cengage Read

I just downloaded the app since I am taking a course that requires MindTap. I was able to use the app just fine! I saw a lot of bad reviews where people complain about this or that and honestly, ignore them. Someone said the online browser didn’t work so they were forced to use app, well they both work as you will soon find out after downloading this app. Someone else said highlighting didn’t work, worked just fine I was even able to add notes to my highlight and change its color. Scrolling through pages was easy it’s like any other program like Pearson where the chapter is split up in segments so the page you are on is the segment. I don’t know why people are complaining you don’t have to know rocket science to use this app. The only thing I would change is maybe making the text reader more human like, it sounds to much like a robot. I like to listen to the chapters being read so I can do other things at the same time and not spend hours watching a screen.

I’m not sure why all the negative reviews. I almost didn’t download this app because the reviews were so bad, but, once I read them, I realized they seemed like whining and not actual reviews of the app. So, here is a review on the app and how it works. I downloaded this app in order to read the text book on my phone. It had me log into my Cengage account, and it had all my text books available to choose from. The app is intuitive to use, similar to Kindle, Libby, or any other reading app I’ve used. It has both, a slide bar and a table of contents, to find the page you need. You can flip or scroll while reading through, and you can pick font size. This is a reader app, and it does what it is supposed to do.

I never have any interest in writing reviews for an app, but because this app is absolutely horrendous AND I’m required to use it everyday for school… I figured this was a worthy effort. There aren’t any instructions on the fact that you have to add your textbook to your library even if you purchased it. It zooms in and out on the text for absolutely no reason at all, and most times it will cut off half the text and won’t adjust appropriately even when you try to zoom out to reset the view. Highlighting is horrendous because it wants to glitch out and highlight whatever random text it wants. The view of the textbook is quite unprofessional in my opinion. It’s like they put it in the app without even thinking about how it would look to people reading it. You can’t even read most tables that they insert in the text. It’s an absolute joy to deal with this. In this day and age, I have no clue why two of my professors would choose this option. And yes, MindTap was required for me so I had to get the digital version and the unlimited subscription is much cheaper than buying physical textbooks and the addition software. Please, for the love of learning, don’t make me hate my class because this app and website are absolutely archaic.