App Profile: The Palace Project

EconMomNumber2

Rating: 5/5

This is a fantastic book by Dana Susskind. She is interviewed in my all-time favorite Freakonomics episode, and I was eager to learn more about her work. The writing and this reading are clear and accessible. It is my first time using Palace project. It would be helpful to get some information about how to scroll to a different chapter or back to the end of the book. The reading ended so abruptly I’m wondering if it got cut off, but it reset to the beginning of chapter 1 so I could not relisten to that last sentence.

adillon1984

Rating: 4/5

I like the way this app looks, and it is simple to navigate, however, I’ve had some dealbreaker issues with it, specifically with audiobooks. I’ve seen at least one other review that had things I experienced, including overheating phone, and fast battery drainage (which are probably related to each other). i’ve also experienced it starting a chapter and then 30 to 40 seconds in it’ll skip back to the beginning. Another issue that has been very frustrating, and to me the biggest dealbreaker, is that it downloaded an audiobook and broke it into an insane amount of chapters. It was the third Game of Thrones book, which is a nearly 50 hour audiobook, and it broke it into 844 small sections which were titled chapters. It makes it very time-consuming and frustrating to find a spot if you lose your place. Also, it caused the downloading of it to take a long time, I don’t have the technical knowledge as to why, but took like an hour. It also froze while downloading and I deleted and re-installed the app and still had the same issue with download time. I hope they can fix this stuff, but I saw that somebody else had a battery drainage problem from like a year before this, so not sure how common it is.

rosydruidess

Rating: 1/5

Quite possibly one of the worst reading apps I’ve ever used. Only had it on my phone for a few days but in the short time I used it I found so many issues. The biggest problem I saw is when I tried borrowing an audiobook. I waited maybe five minutes for it to download and afterwards when I tried to open it the screen would go black and the app would crash. I tired to open it again and the same thing kept happening. I couldn’t even listen to the book I borrowed. On top of that the app takes up so much storage on my phone. Even after browsing and borrowing one book the “documents and data” it took up was around 2 gb! I also thought the search engine is awful, the first results you see are never related to whatever you entered into the search bar. When you tap on a book to see more details like a plot summary there’s nothing, just a black square. I also wished there was some functionality where you could save titles to a list, like the tagging system in the libby app. Overall I wanted to like this because the catalog was fairly extensive but the app is practically unusable for me. Please please update it.