Ebook Central

Without exaggeration, this app has made me more frustrated than any of the thing I have had to use since start college IN 2015. Books will say downloaded but only show a blank page 0 with no way to progress. I thought it was a glitch. Uninstalled and reinstalled the app. Download and removed the book. Tried another book. Literally just does not work. I even updated my device software to try to help. It should not take a PhD to use your app, but this one requires more than that. Shameful.

Two small points: (1) It is indeed frustrating that the app doesn’t keep my place, consider the example—when I’m at work reading a 400 page book on my phone, the scrolling on Safari to elucidate tangent points, and coming back, I find that my progress is lost entirely and I’m sent back to the book library page, and then when I press the book to access the text I’m sent, from there, to the first page of the book. This is very frustrating and makes the experience of using the app quite discontinuous. There should be a ‘locking’ function somehow, in an upcoming update. I’ve taken to remembering my page number and inserting it at the bottom to get back to where I was, prior, whenever I go off on tangents, but this seems unsustainable. Next is that (2) there is really terrible resolution when I zoom in and it is quite hard to read. This is a worse issue than the first and not helpful at all for people with visual issues. Overall, I feel like this app is working against me!

It is regrettable that ProQuest makes us read their materials using the poorly designed and ridiculously implemented app. There are other high quality apps that protect ownership and copyright, but this version from ProQuest is essentially unusable. For example, if I want to stop away from the iPad for a moment and it goes into standby, the Ebook Central app will give an error that the can not be displayed at this time and I need to reload the book, and then find where I left off. This is not user friendly and amounts to a mojo pain to use. Second, the note taking function is ridiculous. In does not allow me to select tact that I’d like to copy, and if I use the copy button at the bottom of the page, it gives me me a random selection of text from someplace near the page I’m reading. ProQuest, what is your goal with this software? So far my only outcome is absolute frustration. If you are going to demand that we use this to read your products, the invest in something that is capable of presenting the material without error, remembers what page I am reading, and is capable of rudimentary note taking for academic clients. Do these three things well and I can forgive some of the other shortcomings.