Cengage Mobile for PC and Mac

Software Reviews and Criticism

• By ccccooolllllleeee

  Almost Useful

  This is so so close to being somewhat useful. It’s almost reasonable to take this app and use it in a pinch (like studying on a plane or something), but it’s just not quite worth it. I downloaded this app on my phone to use the audiobook feature while I drive or travel, but the player is absolute garbage. The voice is choppy and difficult to understand if you’re not reading along, and you can’t even change it to a better voice. You can’t pick a spot to start reading, just like the website reader, but this doesn’t even have a scrub bar! There isn’t even that terrible feature where the reader starts at the top of your screen, it starts at the beginning of THE CHAPTER. You can’t rewind and you can’t jump to a different section. To their credit, you can at least set the reading speed to 2x, but that just makes everything less understandable. I also like the search feature, it’s pretty nifty. Really my only complaint is the absolute garbage reader.

  
  
• By mexican_angel01

  A lot can be improved on

  I haven’t been using the app for a long time but some things I’ve noticed that can be improved upon are the following: Syncing highlighted or bookmarked text in books across devices that are logged in on the same account. If I want to read and highlight information on my phone, it would be nice if it showed on my iPad. Being able to do quizzes on my iPad or iPhone would most helpful. At minimum the iPad because if I’m on the go and need to get work I can’t just log into a laptop I don’t have. The same could be said about study cards. If I want extra study time on the go being able to pull the flash cards my phone or iPad would be nice and helpful. I haven’t played around with the auto reader too much but the little bit I did, it sounds bad.

  
  
• By EmersonTheTaurus

  Hey Don’t Be So Mean

  I decided to write a review because I feel l need to help defend this app. Maybe it’s because I downloaded it with extremely low expectations that I was more than pleased with how it turned out to be. I downloaded it for one purpose: to read my textbook offline and in a dedicated app. Based on another review, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to. I normally access my book through a link in my Canvas course, and I was afraid it wouldn’t show up when I logged in with the personal email address I used to create a Cengage account with at some point. However, it showed up in my “Books” and gave me the option to download, which I did. I had no expectations of being able to multitask by having pages side by side. I don’t know how anyone could do that on an iPhone screen anyway. As far as the textbook layout, it’s a little different from the browser version, but I don’t find it difficult to use. It’s more like a normal textbook with multiple pages in a section instead of one long screen you scroll through for each section. Anyway, if you just want an app to read your textbook with, here you go.

  
  
• By whovianelite

  Can’t log in

  So I assume that an app made for mobile devices will make reading a text book on said device much easier than trying to use browser controls. The problem I ran into is that I cannot log in to the app at all, I guess because all my courses are concave through blackboard. It’s absolutely absurd that I can take 10+ classes using cengage, but if I want to read on my phone I have to make a new account and pay for something I’ve already paid for. If there is a way to log in using my blackboard credentials then spending a half hour searching forums and the cengage support page should have uncovered something. This app is nothing but a money grab!!! If this is representative of the company’s value system then cengage needs to be replaced by a company that cares about the education of the students they supply! After reading other reviews it seems I’m lucky that I couldn’t log in to see the disaster that the app really is.

  
  
• By ResovoltOG

  Cengage: Please just stop

  Using Cengage’s e-reader, and accessing the associated “MindTap” materials is infuriating. It doesn’t have to be this way. Cengage: if you’re going to create an educational ecosystem and charge and arm and a leg for it, you better actually provide a decent product. This is unfortunately the worst experience I’ve had with an “eBook” to date. Their servers can’t handle the number of students using the service and recently had a massively inconvenient outage. Bookmarks and highlighted passages mysteriously vanish from the app, something that’s unforgivable when I’m trying to research. There’s no obvious way to identify page numbers or paragraph locations, so citing the book as a resource is almost impossible. The UI is unresponsive and occasionally crashes. I got prompted for the app to track my location—why would you need that, Cengage?! I’m taking every possible opportunity to complain about your terrible products. Let me buy the book as a PDF, load it in Acrobat, and stop wasting your engineering resources on gatekeeping knowledge. Your priorities are out of alignment with what students and teachers need, and I hope your shareholders are as ticked off as your users are. I don’t want your MindTap features, I don’t want your “flash cards,” I don’t want your app. Let me learn MY way and stop wasting resources in the pursuit of control. Put it on Kindle, give it to Openstax, let buyers get a PDF, I don’t care. Just stop this.

  
  

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