Everand: Audiobooks & Ebooks

For less than the cost of a 1-book-a-month audible subscription, you get three. It’s way better value. My library uses hoopla not Libby, which has a really limited collection. And Libby, when I could use it, only lets you have a book for 2 weeks, often after a months long wait for a popular title. As someone who loves listening to audio books while cleaning and driving and exercising, it’s a great addition and worth the cost. I also love that you can listen to a really substantial sample of a book before committing to redeeming one of your credits on it. There have been a few I sampled but realized were not for me after listening. I wasted a lot of audible credits on books I didn’t really get into. The only drawbacks are that you can’t send ebooks to your kindle, like you can with Libby, and the app can be glitchy. A few times I ran into problems with the app suddenly marking a book I was in the middle of as finished while I was listening to it, and not allowing me to go any further. The customer service was no help. The only solution was to delete and reinstall the app which I figured out on my own. I didn’t lose my place but it was annoying and I hope it doesn’t keep happening.

Very frustrated. Back when they just had the SCRIBD app, performance was snappy and all was well. This EVERAND app has always been clunky. I don't know why one would bother downloading any audiobook on the app because if you're ever off-line without any Internet connection or cellular, you won't be able to pull up your saved audiobook or e-book. The app just spins and spins. You won't be able to read or listen to your book until your phone has reliable reception again, despite the fact that the book is fully downloaded to your phone. Lastly, it's highly frustrating that now, with this new subscription model restricting legacy subscribers, excluding so many books one can listen to or read, they do not give you a simple way to filter. So if you're searching for a book, as a legacy subscriber, you have to select the item first. Then, and only then do you learn that it's not available unless you are willing to pay more money. Always the pitch to pay more money. If they want to support legacy subscribers, they should allow for a feature in the settings that allows the user to exclude those items that cost more money so that they don't clog up search results. I believe I may be done with this app when my subscription runs out this time. I'm not interested in paying a decent amount of money for an annual subscription, only to be pitched time and again about a book that I cannot read or listen to, being told that I need to pay them more money.

I truly admire the extensive library this app offers, I have no trouble finding just about any book, topic, document I want to read in pdf, audiobook, etc form. There’s even sheet music for crying out loud. While the app makes it easy to upload and read uploaded documents the app fails to make it easy to see notes you have saved. When you try clicking on the note you have written, it never shows it; instead you will literally have to go to the notebook & bookmark tab and scroll down to find the note you marked. I also dislike how the highlighter in this app only comes in blue and sometimes the app doesn’t recognize the highlighted sections you made on a page until you refresh it or return the page after scrolling around. Its a trivia matter but it took me a long time to get use to the color because I’ve always highlighted in yellow. The blue is hard to read sometimes, so they should give you color options or even a way you can save audio notes. Jumping to pages or returning to pages you left off at on the bottom slider is hard to navigate and basically useless; last but not least they make it impossible to cancel/ pause ur subscription from the phone app. Its the 21st century we need to be better than this. Somehow with all these complaints the desktop version is even worse than the phone app yet I still read a Multitude of things on spirituality and history from scribd weekly. This could be the best literature app for a true researcher/ scholar but there’s few bugs/ customization options that are holding it back.

I had subscribe to the service for about five months or so then decided to cancel recently just to find out the date it cut me off a day early. I just needed to save some money recently so I decided to cancel for a short period of time but I’m not sure I’m coming back after my experience. During the time I subscribed, I kept having issues that the audiobooks I wanted to listen to were unavailable until the next renewal date. I would still have 10 days left on my subscription and find out that I couldn’t listen to the next audiobook I wanted to listen to in the series because it wasn’t available until my next subscription renewal date. This happened three times and it was very annoying. While this service may be cheaper than Audible, the aggravation may not be worth it. The app is also glitchy. I had times when I would answer the phone and the audiobook would still play in the background while I was trying to hear phone calls. I would set up to play the audiobook sometimes, and it would just cut off by itself while I was driving. Which is annoying because I live in a hands-free state and can’t go back and reboot the app. The glitches seemed to happen more often after I decided to cancel for a little while. The audio player with clothes for no reason in recent weeks and I kept having to stop what I was doing to reopen it just to get it to play again. Probably won’t renew now after the recent experience. You should shop around.

Amazing selection for a subscription service. Both the ebook and audiobook libraries are so extensive, I love it! But everything else needs work. PLEASE fix your audiobook speeds! In the app it only goes to 2.0 and that just isn’t fast enough. And on the website it jumps from 2x to 3x speed with nothing in between! That’s such a ridiculous jump! I know I’m not the only one to complain about this and people have been for a long time. I don’t understand why it’s not been fixed yet. Please improve your speed options! Also, reading on anything other than an ereader for extended periods is painful. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way too. Please fix it so we can send ebook files to our ereaders! Other apps (Libby) have that option, why not yours? Also, I think it’s a very misleading to say a subscription provides unlimited access to your library when it doesn’t. Stuff is unavailable to me all the time and not because it’s an upcoming release, but because… I don’t know why. I constantly get stuff held back until my next pay cycle. While I appreciate that eventually I’ll have access to it, I don’t like that I’m told I have unlimited access when that’s actually not the case. And the stuff I don’t have access to right away won’t even show up when I search for it on the app. I have to search on the website and even then I have to search by the title specifically, not author or genre, for it to show so I can add it to my saved folder. Why hide stuff? Seems shady.

Great selection of audiobooks from the big publishers. Ebooks have less options but still a good selection for this price point. I switched to scribd from kindle unlimited, and not having to wade through poorly edited self pubbed books is huge! That being said, the reading experience on the kindle app is far superior than within the scribd app. The lack of page turn animation and poor formatting of the book breaks the immersion of reading. I’m an equal opportunity reader, but I would still like for my ebooks to emulate a physical book reading experience. On all other ebook platforms, you can set the font, spacing, alignment, etc. but even after customization the ebook mirrors the page breaks and chapter headings of the physical book. Scribd does not appear to have this functionality, and if you customize those features then the book gets wonky on the display. The user interface is generally not the best. The audiobook interface is nice and has everything I would expect, so it is really just the ebook formatting I have an issue with. If you are a book lover, that switched to ebooks for storage and reduce piles of books around the house, you will likely have the same complaints. I want my ebooks to have the same or similar aesthetic as my physical books, and the lack of effort by scribe towards making the ebooks enjoyable to read and engage with may keep me from having an ongoing subscription. If it doesn’t matter to you, then this app will be perfect for you... for me it is difficult to engage with the content when it looks ugly and poorly formatted on the screen.