RedShelf for Android

The app is garbage: slow, buggy, and often unresponsive. The only reading option is continuous scroll with no ability to read it with pages like a real book or like kindle let’s you. The continuous scroll is awful and often cuts off in the middle of a section, so you may have to wait for multiple sections to load to read a single chapter. Sometimes it cuts off at the header for a section, so if you click on the TOC it takes you to the last page of the section, then you have to exit for the next section to load. If you open the sidebar to access the TOC or to search, it doesn’t collapse correctly and you get stuck with a tiny sliver of text as if the sidebar was still open and the only work around is to go back a section, wait for it to load, then go forward again and wait for it to load. The service is garbage: outages for over 24 hours during finals with nothing more than a “we’re sorry for an inconvenience” message on the error page. I would never use this service if it didn’t have a monopoly on the ebooks i need for class. Even then, often I cannot use it during class to follow along because it is so slow and buggy.

I cringe when I have a book assigned through brytewave/redshelf. I have never experienced a worse format to read a book. I love ebooks usually, but this is very cumbersome and not useful. Books get locked into the last place read with no way to force them to your current reading “location”. The pages are not resized to be easily read like a typical epub or kindle format — instead you’re left panning back and forth on the screen. I once reached out to customer support and they said that the reader is really intended for laptop use, well that’s not an ereader and don’t make a terrible app for a phone if you don’t want people reading on their phone. The text to speech is also very poor, I’m glad I don’t need that feature.

considering all it needs to do is display online textbooks it is shocking how it managed to be this poorly made.Page number icons cover text with no possible option to remove them. Copying text results in that portion of the textbook being made entirely unreadable with no way to remove the erratic grey lines. Its a never ending list of completely unnecessary problems

It takes too lo g to search and read some books. Would gladly change this review ifproblems gets fixed.

This app is so helpful. I use it every time I study for a report, test, or essay. I haven’t found many issues. However, it’s easier to search on desktop than mobile.