Deseret Bookshelf LDS Books for Android

There are books on this app inspire, inform, and entertain. It meets my needs and well worth the price.

Would love to see the ability to slow down the play of audiobooks like other industry leading audiobook players.

I’ve enjoyed the variety of what is offered on Deseret Bookshelf. When I’m in a serious mood or lighthearted or whatever I am in the mood for I can find that type of book or podcast or reading material. It’s invigorated me and uplifted my day. I find uplifting positive works to fill my mind and heart.

Someone needs to bring this app up to date. I’d installed the original app (unpaid) with the intention to upgrade. I’d click on a book title I was interested in and a pop up advertising the subscription would appear, with no link or anything to actually upgrade. I had to just kind of figure out how to upgrade on my own. Because of this, it took me months before I finally had the time to figure out how to do it. It seems like a wasted opportunity not to link that pop up to a place to pay. Then, when I finally found out where to go to update (the website as far as I could tell because there’s nowhere to do it in the app) the technology for entering card information is totally archaic and impossible to use from a phone browser (hiiiiighly inconvenient to have to get to a desktop) and then, even on the desktop, it was tricky to pay for it. I recommended this app to my mom and told her we should read some things together and have a mini book club. She had similar experiences trying to sign up and without even knowing about my struggles, told me how hard it was for her. She said, “boy, you have to REALLY want to give them your money” 😅 Someone definitely needs to make it easier for more people to give you their money. That being said, I bought a year subscription and I am SO excited to use it. I’ve already started 3 different books because it’s hard to choose! Having the ability as a busy mom to listen to beautiful, uplifting content is such an exciting prospect. Hopefully the bugs will get worked out so this app is more easily accessible to more people.

Tons of great content available on this app and playback is flawless. However, the font is absurdly small in all areas of the UI. When viewing a list of podcasts in the grid view, all you can see is the artwork. It’s a pointless way to view this type of content as there in no distinguishable difference between the episodes. The list view does include one line of text, but the font is ridiculously small and the title is truncated with ellipses at the end of the line, making the episode titles difficult to read. The app does struggle to receive podcast updates and forcing a sync does not help. Deleting older files seems to help, but that can only be done one-by-one. Just a few thought out changes to the UI layout and text presentation would make this app much more user friendly. The sync issue may be harder to solve, but would be greatly appreciated.