I had to download this to read ebook from my local library and it’s one of the worse apps I have ever used in my life. I have an iPhone XS Max and this app is not maximized for this phone or any phone models with the black bar at the top, because the first time of the page is right where the black bar is which means you can’t read at least 3-4 words every page! The app also loves to freeze out or just glitch out randomly, especially when you switch out of it and come back in or change screen orientation. I also like continuous scrolling for reading instead of having to swipe because it’s a hassle, not to mention if you are reading in a dark/dim space it has to load every page (which takes a bit) and the loading screen is WHITE while I’m reading in dark mode! I honestly can’t believe this is a published app! I wish I could use the books app right on my iPhone for the library materials but sadly I can’t. This is really a pity and I hope adobe fixes this disaster soon so people can actually use it to read or study.
There are problems that me and all of my classmates mentioned while we were using this app. The main problem is that it lags and stops a lot if you are using it offline. When you flip through pages too much, it starts to freeze for a while before you can flip the pages again. So when we were looking for a certain page in our ebook, the app lagged every 10-15 seconds. This happens less frequently with internet connection, but it can still happen. Especially if the app has not loaded certain parts of the book yet. Another problem is that there isn't a simpler way to find a certain page. Even though the app has a scroller that helps you jump through the pages, it doesn't indicate which page you're going to flip to. If there's a way you can do this in the future, that would be good as well. TL;DR I don't recommend this app for anyone who wants to use this for ebooks. Whether for educational or recreational purposes. It's better if you find an app that can do so much better until Adobe fixes these problems. It's not worth it.
I just purchased an eBook and it required me to download this app to read it. I spent $40 on it. I want to share my extreme dissatisfaction with the quality of the eBook format. It was ridiculously challenging to download and I spent nearly 40 minutes trying to figure out how to download it. I finally figured out what the issue was by looking at the comments on the IOS reviews page from several others that had similar issues. The trouble was that you cannot use safari to download it so I had to get an all new internet browser to download it. Then once it was finally downloaded I was incredibly disappointed in the quality of the e-reader itself. The content in the book is great. I know because I have the paperback version. But I was looking for an electronic version that I could take on the road with me and easily access when away from home. When you read the book in the eBook format it looks awful. Words are cut off, you can't even finish reading complete sentences because the formatting is all wonky. This app is absolutely is ridiculous. The quality is so poor it is completely unreadable.
I have been reading books on my phone for more than a decade, and I’ve use lots of different apps to do it over time. This feels like the worst of a first generation app: The majority of the screen space is blank around a tiny narrow column of text that looks ridiculous justified, because it truly creates distracting volumes of white space down the middle of the page. Better apps designed for actual readers go closer to the margin of the screen, allow you to stop justifying the text when doing so avoids that distracting white space that literally makes it harder to read, or to keep the justification when it is appropriate for the text. Adobe’s name is synonymous with graphic design, programs like Photoshop are now so powerful and flexible that that very flexibility is intimidating to many new users. It seems clear that they forgot that flexibility when creating this terrible implementation of an e-book reader. It forces screens to look like weirdly distorted printed and pages and ignores years of experience that make better readers actually a pleasure to use.
I just wanted to read an e-book from my local library and had to download this app to read the book. I saw all the one star reviews and got a little freaked out but I still gave it a try because I really wanted to read this book. There’s no real tutorial on how it works but I figured it out on my own after 10 minutes. Got the book into the app and there’s no way to actually read it? I read the title page, the acknowledgement page, and then the remaining pages after that were blank? Like blank pages or blank pages with like black smears? I guess the pages don’t display properly on the screen once the book is in the app. I mean there were literally no words on the remaining pages after the acknowledgment page. Don’t even waste your time. Even if you do everything right, once you actually download and open the book, you won’t be able to load the contents of the book. Would give 0 stars if I could but hey at least maybe I can save someone time with my review.
I’m disappointed in ADE. I had no problem loading in DRM ePub and reading them. However, I find ADE very lacking in features. Features like word definitions, phrase translation, underlining and highlighting in various colors, ability to google and hotlink to places, people and art described in ebooks. I was a big fan and user for many years of Neosoar another DRM e reader. Unfortunately, they seem to be recently out business. It took a while for Neosoar to get to a point of near perfection with these features I’ve listed above. But the absolute best was your annotations were linked to Dropbox. So, any additions or notations or hotlinks would be saved in Dropbox. If you changed or upgraded your e reader you would upload the DRM e book and sync with Dropbox and all your annotations would appear. You would not lose any annotations. Neosoar is a great loss to those of us need an e reader that is fully connected to power of the internet. It is unfortunate that ADE does not measure up. In the future it could if Adobe puts in the effort.
As someone who has had to continue using this app on desktop and iOS for years now because I teach from a textbook that is only available in this app digitally, I can honestly say, it’s the worst. It feels from experience like Adobe is doing the bare minimum to keep the app alive. A list of things I experience: -Random pages that look fine on desktop look blown out and unreadable on iPad or iPhone. -Authorizing e-books can take multiple attempts and restarted the app before they appear. -Navigation and scrolling through the book is clunky only at a single speed. -Clicking and dragging to highlight text (YES it does actually have a HIGHLIGHT feature!) is clunky: Saved highlights have disappeared and you have to click and drag above a sentence to highlight it as if the entire alignment of words is off. So if I want to click and drag, I need to do so an inch or less above the actually words to effect them. -Hidden adware install on the desktop version. If you are not careful it comes with Norton Antivirus which will install with the program if you aren’t careful to hit no on install I could go on. I have asked my textbook manufacture to use another product. I ask Adobe to make this app, at least functional, but preferably at least competitive to other e-book readers. For now, I suffer through.
UPDATE: You should know this app is no longer under development. If you can, email your ebook’s publisher and ask for an alternative to this app… If you’ve ever thought to yourself, how can we make the process of obtaining a digital copy of a book more difficult and then, once the poor idiots figure out how to do it, how can we make the experience as excruciating, rudimentary, and utterly disconnected from the rest of the 21st century as possible... you probably designed this app. The designers haven’t even figured out how to fit pages onto your device. YOU CANT EVEN READ THE PAGES CORRECTLY, because the app hasn’t been updated to Apple’s own screen real estate standards. The notch on my iPhone fully obscures the top of every page. What person who wants to read would actually choose this app? Has anyone from Adobe who actually reads books tried to use this app? My guess is no.
I have recently needed to download this app since an ebook was only available through Adobe’s DRM. So far the MacOS version is serviceable—not the best navigation but you can get around. The iOS version is unusable. It crashes during searches, pages are missing or unreadable (don’t know if this is a scanning issue, but why then does it work on the macOS version?), and navigation is neglible. Many many people read ePubs on a tablet like the iPad, so it boggles my mind that a company like Adobe wouldn’t put some effort into this product. I imagine with Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks taking a lot of the market share, perhaps there is not enough market left to tempt them. But I suspect that there are plenty of authors/publishers who would like to skip the massive fees that both companies impose, so there is a real Power-to-the-Author-People market that can develop here if they play their cards right.
On first use, the app appears unusable (at least when viewing some books) as other users state. The default color scheme (middle button icon at the bottom when viewing a book, leftmost option) seems to be the culprit. The two other color options appear to display my book correctly. But even then, this is a very basic e-reader for DRM protected content. You can highlight in what appears to be only a single color, bookmark pages, view the table of contents, view all of your highlights and bookmarks, search text, and display content in two (functional) color schemes (white text/black background, and black text/brown background). That’s about it for functionality. Highlights are ugly and are broken up by the spacing between highlighted words. Recommend looking elsewhere; this app isn’t worth its free price tag.
UPDATE: The issue with accessing my purchase was resolved without explanation, so I can’t tell whether Adobe, the bookseller, or both caused the problem. Now I just have the lousy interface to deal with. STILL no update since 2018. Tip: Before clicking on a footnote, remember your page number. After reading the footnote, you’ll have to navigate back to the page you were reading by typing in the page number. POSTED IN 2020: This a barely adequate ebook reader. It is difficult to use. It frequently loses track of users’ books. And as I learned today, Adobe refuses to support it. Want help with Digital Editions? You’ll be referred to an online forum where someone else has already posted about your issue — in 2017, with no response since. Active development of this app appears to have ended in 2018. Using it is like working with the walking dead. The book I purchased in 2020, which is only accessible through this app, has disappeared. Oh, the book still exists in the cloud. I can still authorize the app with my Adobe credentials. But the book cannot be recovered, for reasons that will not be explained. Adobe could not possibly care less about my lost purchase. They already received their percentage. Thanks to this experience, Adobe has lost my business for life.
I travel a lot and only have an I pad for a computer, it works fine with almost everything but whenever I need adobe for something it is a mess. I have the most recent I pad and it is just as powerful as a computer but for some reason adobe removes basic functions of applications in the I pad IOS. I have been trying to trouble shoot so I can authorize my e-reader with adobe using my i pad so I can download library epubs, there is no way I can trouble shoot this and now I need to hunt down someone who will let me run ADE to download simple library books, this is ridiculous and furthering my disgust with adobe products. Adobe do better and stop limiting I pad IOS, this has been an issue for years now and honestly I am beyond fed up, there is no reason with the power of current I pads to limit them like this, they function essentially as computer.
Keep in mind that Apple forces a star eating and I’d like to give this a -1,000,000 star rating. This is single-handedly the worst app on all of the App Store. It is amazing that Apple allows this hunk of garbage to remain while other much more fit apps are denied. In addition to the clunky reading experience, the fact that you are trapped to using it if the publisher in their infinite wisdom has chosen to use the simply awful Adobe DRM is absolutely disgusting. Adobe has simply been missing the mark from one instance to another. I have stopped using all of the products that use to use except photoshop and that’s on its way out. It seems that adobe doesn’t want survive the next decade with the awful premiere pro, after effects, illustrator, acrobat, and now this trash program. It is simply awful. Even their express doesn’t hold a candle to other online programs like candle. Adobe, you are trash
As a professional who also works in both in the private sector and in the academia, I am oftentimes suggested to use this app as the only way to read things offline. What is the big deal here? Why does Adobe backs up this software at the same time they own blockbuster software of the modern world such as Photoshop and Acrobat? This app simply does not make any sense; everything stinks about it, from the very beginning (login interface) to the end (the end will be somewhere you can’t do anything further to progress and you become entirely stuck, because the app simply doesn’t work). Shame on the management who uphold such a failure of being still alive and untouched for more than two years. Failure for the science where so many people are interrupted from proceeding with their normal tasks because of the great barrier this app provides. It’s a shame.
I tried our Adobe Digital Editions because it seemed easier than waiting for the library to open and go through all their COVID restrictions to get a book. Why get a physical copy when I have a perfectly good iPad and the library is offering an eBook? Well now I have to go get the physical copy because Adobe Digital Editions only lets me read roughly five pages at a time before it glitches and won’t advance a page. Only gets stuck on a blank white screen. It’s not a simple fix either. Closing the app and reopening it doesn’t do anything. The book is now “expired” despite the fact I just checked it out an hour ago. I’m shocked this is even an Adobe product. They should be ashamed of how poorly it works. A group of college freshmen could probably make an app 100x better than this, or at least one that works MORE than this Adobe product does. Jeez.
It’s a shame that this app is still required to read ebooks you’ve already paid for. Normally I would reject downloading any kind of app created for the sole purpose of enforcing ludicrous DRM restrictions but this was a new release and I had to read it for work. The process of getting this working on multiple devices is a callback to a distinctly 1990s technology experience. Once you do it never really works or looks good and the UI is abominable. Remember opening Word docs on a Mac in 1996? Like you COULD but it was sluggish and awkward and you had the fear that if you clicked anything the whole thing would crash and bring the system down with it? It’s like that. Deleting Adobe Digital Editions was a really satisfying experience, certainly more enjoyable than any single moment of using this awful thing.
I tried using Apple's built-in screen reader to read books on this app, but the app does not allow it to work at all. No matter what book I try to read, it will only read the page number and nothing else. I'm not sure if this incompatibility is specifically with Apple or if other screen readers don't work with this app either. Regardless, it is extremely frustrating, especially since this app is the only way I can access ebooks through my university's library. Clearly Adobe did not give the slightest consideration to accessibility when creating this app. Strangely, it is only the mobile app that has this problem. The desktop app works perfectly fine on my Macbook, which is how I know that the mobile app is the problem, not the books I downloaded.
Given how big Adobe is as a company, I’d happily give 0 star if that’s an option. The whole app is very glitchy when loading the EPUB file, and it very frequently failed to load the next page when flipping pages, moreover, it frequently jumps multiple pages forward or backward when flipping pages. Imagine when you want to read the next page and it stay blank for more than 2 minutes, and you finally run out of patience and clicking the screen multiple times, it either gave no response after another 10 seconds of waiting, or suddenly brought you to some random page far back or ahead. Then you’re going through another round of long-wait-for-page-loading to navigate back to where all this headache began.
I purchased an ebook not realizing I would have to use this terrible app to barely be able to uses the book on my iPhone. Calling this app terrible is actually too good of a word. Even after realizing I would not be able to adequately view the book I purchased on my iPhone, I tried to download it to my laptop…and that was a disaster. Even though I used the same login as on my iPhone with everything identical on my laptop as my phone…you can guess, it didn’t work. Even after erasing, reinstalling, reverifying the credentials and every other possible thing I could, it did not work. I wasted money so hopefully you can save yours. Avoid at all cost, just buy the paperback version of whatever you are reading. I would give this app negative stars if I could.
There must be quite the financial incentive for publishers to use this app instead of Kindle or one of the others, because I increasingly find it to be my only option with some library books. Its basic, no-frills format would not be a big deal if the danged thing actually worked! But it’s SO FRUSTRATING to use, with the constant freezing and constant absolutely blank pages. Which I guess is freezing, idk- I’ve waited very long periods of time but the words won’t populate until I take some further action. Absolutely horrible. It took me forever to even figure out why “EPub” stopped being available in the EPub app! I could not figure out what I was doing wrong until finally located the painful instructions in Support. There have been so many digital library books that I waited a long time for, and when I see that it’s an “EPub” book after finally reaching the top of the wait list, I decline it. I read for pleasure; ADE makes reading excruciating. I just finished reading 2 that I had waited weeks for - F-bombs frequently flying during the course of it - and it will be a long time before I do it again. I feel very badly for students who have no alternative, for their e-textbooks.
I am amazed that this is an Adobe product and that it is allowed to be on the App Store. Truly, it is a worthless piece of junk! I purchased an ebook from a small, independent press and this is the app it’s compatible with. (I’m assuming the publisher is paying Adobe for the privilege… if so, Adobe should give them their money back plus compensation.) I opened the book and it appeared they’re was no content. However, at the bottom of the blank page was a page number. So I zoomed in and then outlines of letters appeared. Then I zoomed out and the words disappeared again. Then I tapped the page and the words reappeared. (Sometimes. Other times it takes more zooming and moving the page around.) I have to go through these motions on almost EVERY SINGLE PAGE! I am so glad the book is only 50 pages long! I am on page 20 and am so frustrated with trying to get the words to appear that I may give up and go buy the paper copy. It’s a shame, and I feel sorry for anyone who bought an expensive and decently long book and was expecting to be able to read it. Adobe usually stands for quality… what happened here??
I would have to say this is probably the most frustrating app I have ever used in my entire life. I literally have to pray each time that when I flip a page that it will actually go to the next page, won’t go blank, won’t skip around, won’t lose my place…. please save yourself so much headache and do not bother downloading this app. If this is the only way for you to read a book, just go borrow it at your local library or pay a couple of dollars for the Kindle edition. Trust me that five dollars or whatever you may spend rather than reading for free on this will be worth every penny because you won’t pull out half of your hair trying to get this ridiculously buggy stupid worthless app to work. Literally the absolute worst app I have ever used.
I concur with other reviewers who have down rated this app. My advice: if there’s a digital book that you want to buy that requires Adobe Digital Editions, just don’t buy the digital book! Find another format to buy it in if you can. This app has given me so much frustration and it’s only getting worse. I don’t think the developer reads these reviews or cares because there have been no updates to the app in over a year now. This is the reason performance of the app just keeps getting worse. Publishers also need to STOP OFFERING DIGITAL BOOKS REQUIRING THIS APP. It becomes very unfair to the buyers of your products. How Adobe can associate its name with this - I have no idea. If you don’t want to update this app can you please just render it obsolete and stop wasting everybody’s time & money.
When I first began to use ADE, I thought there was no way the ratings could be true - that this app was somehow THAT bad. On desktop versions, it won’t allow you access to an “account” page to even figure out what email you’re “licensing” under, which makes it near impossible to use the same account on other devices. It is INCREDIBLY counterintuitive. Now that I’m having to read textbooks for my courses on here, and frequently using the highlighting function, I find that every few minutes the app will crash. When it crashes it not only sends me BACK to the page I was on minutes before the crash, but it will also ERASE all of my highlighting. Why any service would voluntarily provide .acsm format ebooks (looking at you University of Chicago Press) when the app is THIS bad, and not give you ANY alternatives ie beyond me.
this is the only app that my school has recommended we use for our downloads. my main issue is that when i download my slide notes, it will double and sometimes even triple the downloads and causes it to take up space and glitch out. if i try to delete the duplicates, my original file won’t work. i don’t understand why this is an issue. and even if i receive the one download, it won’t save correctly unless i flip through some of the pages before i return to the home screen. the only way i’ve found it to work is by downloading one thing individually and flipping through it when i just need to download multiple one after the other and THEN go back and read them. i only do this so i can access them offline at home but i can’t even do that.
My university enables students to temporarily download some of their ebooks. It’s been a great and confident resource when traveling with little to no WiFi. I’ve used the windows version of this app without issue, but as for this app for apple products I only have issues. Problems with this app have consisted simply logging into the app, accepting the downloaded ebooks, and when the app finally accepted the ebooks it would show the text until a page was changed; wherein, the text would break apart and then become very fated, with chunks of the text being completely gone. I wished this program work as it is what my university uses. I just have to use a work around to access the books, and make sure I always have Wi-Fi.
This software essentially does nothing. It does not crash (for me anyway), it just does nothing except show you a manual that supposedly describes how to use it. But the manual as both wrong in many places, and it’s pagination does not even match its table of contents. The thing I wanted it to do most is share ADE’s with my the same software on my Mac, which the manual explicitly states is possible. But after working for a couple of hours at it, it seems impossible to do that. There are simply no commands to allow you to either share a library with the Mac or download books from the Mac library. In fact, there are no commands to do anything useful. You can’t search for ADE’s, or borrow them or purchase them or anything else. I am just stunned at how worthless this app is.
Been using this app for a while now on my iPhone and it is frustrating me to no end. It keeps syncing blank books to my device and then constantly crashes. As if that wasn’t frustrating enough, there isn’t a way to mass delete all those blank books and there over 400 of them! I went through and manually deleted them ALL.... then I thought I might uninstall the app and retry... nope... it just re-sync those 400+ blank books all over again. I would like to have all the hours of my life back that I invested into this app, but I’m doubtful Adobe can make that happen. Perhaps if they enabled two-page view and fixed the glitch where it keeps crashing and syncing blank books... I might be able to forgive them.
I bought a book for IT vendor technical education that requires this app, but I have found it is missing complete pages on the iPad platform! I tried the Mac app and it seems to be ok. So the workaround is to use a screen sharing app to access my Mac running the Mac version of this app from the iPad which then requires me to zoom into the screen, or just use the Mac directly if you can… but the iPad app is useless and I wish I would have bought the hardcover version of the book instead. Even on the Mac app the quality of the images is poor, and it appears Adobe has no plans to maintain this app and should just tell those companies publishing training manuals to find a new ebook format!
I purchased a $40 ebook focused on math education instructional strategies PD. With the limited amount of time I have for planning lessons at school, I figured I could at least read the ebook on my phone while I use the stationary bike or elliptical at the gym in the evenings. Too bad it’s impossible to read on this app. Need to make the text larger? No worries, the app can do that, if you don’t mind turning the page every second because it shows fewer words on the page instead of just making the page longer/scrollable. Need to zoom in on a table/graph/diagram? No can do. So I guess I can do my cardio and read the sample dialogues, but I’ll have no idea what problem or diagram the dialogue is about. Useless.
I have to use this app for a required textbook for a class and it’s horrible. It keeps freezing and will jump around to random pages in the book. When you go to “turn” a page it will sometimes skip back and forth over the page you are trying to get to - it will go forward 2 or 3 pages and when you try to page back it will go back 2-3 pages and it can take a dozen or two tries to get the page you need. If you try to access a page through the table of contents it takes you to some other random page. I do not have these issues with the program on my Windows laptop, it seems to only be an issue with iOS.
I HAVE to use this app for the books for my class. This is the absolute worst experience I’ve ever had trying to access my course material through digital means. The font is so small, and when I attempt to zoom in out it, it skips like five pages forward! This is extremely difficult to do my homework while on vacation, actually the only reason I’m leaving this review is because all of a sudden the book froze on the app, I tried to reinstall the book it’s self without reinstalling the entire app, it didn’t work! So then I deleted the entire app, and in doing so noticed the poor reviews and decided to leave one myself. I’m annoyed. I’m shocked that as big as a company Adobe is, they thought it was ok to develop this crappy app!!!
I have to use this to download my school books so i can have them saved somewhere. I only downloaded this app in the hopes of being able to print the eBook b/c the school didn’t give us a hard copy of the book its all digital. Adobe wants me to Pay for a subscription. However, there is a 30 day free trial. I do not want to have to go through the entire process of canceling it and potential not be able to cancel it. Also, having the possibility that everything you download to the app being canceled after you cancel the subscription. I created an account b/c it was free but, I can’t even log in. I am not paying money to log in not even knowing if I’ll be able to print things.
I was required to use this app for my university reading and it is quite literally the worst app I have ever used. First, creating and using an Adobe ID is so confusing and not explained at all. It was never made clear to me that the password of the gmail account I used to sign up was not my Adobe ID password, so that took 20 minutes to figure out. Then, once I figured out how to actually import the book into the app (another 20 minutes), it was unreadable because the bottom two-thirds of every word is cut off. I followed the troubleshooting guidelines but absolutely nothing worked. This is such an embarrassment of an app, and Adobe might as well delete it and start over. It is beyond saving.
This deserves 0 stars. Didn’t even use it for reading, because I spent 30 minutes troubleshooting how to even upload ONE BOOK FILE INTO THE APP, only to have the app reject my Adobe ID. There is no in-app way to upload files. Let me just repeat that, once more: *THERE IS NO IN-APP WAY TO UPLOAD FILES*. This is a READING APP. An app for reading books!!! And there is NO WAY TO IMPORT. You have to do it manually, through your device’s files. “Did you google it?” Of course I did, and adobe only has instructions for their desktop app version, because they clearly think this app is trash not worth explaining, too. And did I mention it didn’t even accept my Adobe ID? Garbage, trash, a dumpster that’s not even worth setting aflame because of how absolutely useless it is.
Terrible app, really. My Kaplan course only allows us to access our book digitally through this app and I’ve had so many issues. You can’t even see most of the book unless you put it in the “yellow” mode rather than white or black. Even then, the app often crashes and I can’t even open up the book. Another annoying issue is that it starts to lag anytime I try to look something up, and then it just force closes. How is this app still available to use? How are company’s actually recommending this app when the reviews are terrible? I feel bad for those who bought e-books that can only be used on this app just to find they wasted their money (me!).
I work at a library and the platform we use for eBooks is this app (or an equivalent). The books never look good and are illegible - even the “How to use this app” book that comes with the app. It’s very disappointing, though, that when tech support was called and I explained that I don’t have an Adobe account because I work at a library and can’t afford their products, they just dismissed me and told me to hang up, as they can only help paying customers. If this is the app that they want used for eBook that libraries use, they need to do better with the apps and their services. This is disappointing from such a big company and they should do better.
I have used the app in the past to read books in pdf from the internet archive, but ecently the books are illegible in ADE. Most pages are “faded out” and unreadable, although a few appear as normal. I opened a pdf from another source to determine if this problem was related to Internet Archive downloads. A similar problem occurred when I opened a pdf of a HP printer manual in ADE. (Quite a few pages appeared as normal, but latter pages in the document were “faded” and unreadable. Opening the same pdf in Adobe Acrobat was successful and the document was legible in it’s entirety. Unfortunately, DRM pdfs cannot be read in Acrobat. Update: I purchased the Bluefire reader app & my book looks perfect now in Bluefire.
I finally settled down to read the book I paid good money to download to the iPad. After reading the first few pages, I was glad I finally had some time. As I flipped the page I was like “ what the f@#k, the page is blank. I flipped through the book, and all my books and learned that many pages were blank. How does a multi billion dollar company screw this up so bad? It was bad enough going through the very unused friendly process to get the books I purchased downloaded. Now this. I think the management team at Adobe needs to look through all these wonderful reviews and learn from them instead of counting all their bonus money on the golf course.
Adobe should be embarrassed to have their name on this App - Do not waste your time
I am dumbfounded that Adobe would produce a product that is so bad and useless. It simply does not work. People are complaining about the lack of features but the main problem is that the pages do not load consistently. What is the point of an e-reader if the pages are blank? If this were my first Adobe experience, I would not use any of their products. Clearly, Adobe is not vested in this App as they have not addressed the complaints. There are so many books and so little time…I think I will just stick to my Kindle and ignore ePub formatted books! I much prefer reading on Kindle rather than in my browser.
Royal pain to transfer between devices. App should just sync between devices. Does not work as directions indicate. App can not find books that are downloaded locally. Too bad you can’t give a zero. I can not only hope that software developers wanted to develop app that would discourage reading. Just stay with Kindle or iBooks. This just is not worth the hassle. When I rented a book in the kindle format of it just syncs over. With Adobe you need to download, connect devices and MAYBE it will transfer. There is no way to download directly to a mobile device that works. And of course much of the time it can't connect to the fulfillment server. Only way this app could be worse is if it didn't load at all.
I recently purchased a professional therapeutic evaluation tool in digital format that is published and accessible only on the Adobe Digital Editions app. The material was not inexpensive. I had never heard of this Adobe app before, but I followed the instructions and downloaded the app so that I could have access to my purchased material. The app is terrible. It does not render pages clearly. There is no way to print a page, which is a vital feature of what I purchased. Scrolling is choppy at best. There is nothing redeemable about this app at all. Adobe needs to do some serious work to make it usable. In its current state it is completely unusable. If I could rat it negative 5 stars I would.
But this app is so bad I felt compelled to do my part to drag it down, and possibly, hopefully, lead to its eventual demise. My library uses OverDrive, and OverDrive decided to use this app for EPUB books (never mind that they managed fine before without it). I’m grateful, both to my local library, and to OverDrive, for building a world with “digital libraries.” However, this app is so poorly designed, structured, and engineered, that it almost feels like Adobe made intentional choices to make the EPUB format as brutal to use as possible. And OverDrive, which is owned by Rakuten, which owns Kobo E-Readers (which natively support EPUB… take that in for a minute. This is a company that has their own E-Reader software), eagerly embraced this reality.
You’d think Adobe would see the terrible feedback here and get straight to work but for those of us who have no choice but to use this crap, but until then is students will have to suffer. The lags and freezes are frustrating. On both my iPhone and iPad pages of my textbook mysteriously vanish, so as I go to the next page, it’s the previous page and the sentence does not make sense. This results in me losing a minute while I try to flip through pages to somehow urge the reader to produce the missing page. What a waste of time! I just want to study, not be constantly stopped because the reader is complete junk. Adobe—hurry up and fix this issue!!!
This is somehow less competent than any app still running a version that came out in 2005. How shall I begin? 1. The entire aesthetic of it is terrible. It’s worse than goodreads 2. Each time you swipe to turn the page (when it works) the screen goes white 3. The text sizer is impossible to use and is also activated when you use two fingers 4. My notched phone (iPhone 11) has the text cut off at the top. Keep in mind the iPhone X came out in 2018, which means this app hasn’t changed that yet 5. Even though it is “downloaded” it will still buffer and blast a white screen in your face while it loads 6. The fact that adobe has the gall to push this to publishers as a “great way for digital arcs!” While the formatting is so terrible that my dead grandmother could have done better. Yes yes, your book is great. However, why is the text overlapping?? This is terrible and since it’s so bad (and has been bad for a while) I’m guessing they don’t care. Lovely. Lost all brand integrity in one single app
Do not buy downloadable PDFs that require this terrible software
Spent addition $20 on an online college textbook for the downloadable version. Terrible terrible choice. I ended up only being able to use it on this app with is horrible. I cannot even enter a page number to jump to. And don’t worry, because when you want to scroll to the page, a stupid bar pops up that blocks you from seeing any page number, so you have to wait until it goes away to see the number. Idk who would create this program with 0 functionality. I cannot believe the managers who approved this project either. Massive joke. Will be seeking a refund for my college textbook.
I’m a grad student and am for some reason required to download this app to access books that I need for class. The process of downloading/making account etc. in the first place was inconvenient enough, but even after getting the book to download most of the pages are LITERALLY MESSED UP TO THE POINT THAT I AM UNABLE TO DECIPHER ANYTHING. I know it is not something wrong with the Downloaded book because the messed up pages are different every time I reopen the book. This app is not good, literally does not perform the singular function that it exists for and now I’m unable to complete my readings. Would give -5 stars if I could…
I was required to download this app to get the digital version of a textbook. The contents index loads fine - but the rest of the contents/pages do not load at all; the pages look like they are print jobs from a printer that ran out of its toner, and are completely illegible. The pages I skip to won’t load at all. Total waste of time and space on my phone (iOS). Whoever is responsible for maintaining/updating this app needs to fix the issue and should be ashamed of themselves for continuing to be complacent/not resolving the issue after receiving all the other negative reviews. I am also contacting my school so they can find an alternative to this app.
I double checked to confirm that Adobe has really signed off on this product. This reader is amazingly unfunctional, awkward and fidgety. I have been forced to use it until I find something that actually works better, and would urge Adobe systems to use some of their resources to completely rewrite it. The pages show as tiny on my iPad, and I need to adjust the size of each page with my fingers in order to read the print, and then shrink it again to get to the next page, which is by no means certain. If the page wont turn, I have to close out the screen and reopen it to move to the next page. A smart high school student could write a better app than this. Adobe??
I am required to use this app to access online resources from my university library. For one book, it took me an hour to go from reserving it at my uni library to downloading it onto my iPad. Once I did download it, I noticed that the rendering of the text is confusing and frequently misaligned or beyond the limits of the screen space. Scrolling at even a moderate pace causes freezing. Reading to study, I was naturally interested in having my highlights exported to add to my digital notes, but that's not possible. This app feels like something made over a decade ago. For a company that charges so much for most of its products and is so terribly hyper-vigilant about maintaining its siloed ecosystem, I expected better.
One eBook reader for all your Adobe DRM protected books across your iPad, Mac or PC. Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) is free-to-download and use, and completely ad-free. Use it to read EPUB and PDF books, both online and offline. Borrow ebooks from many public libraries for use with ADE. Extend your reading experience by transferring books from your personal computer to your iPad. Organize your books into a beautiful custom library. Experience gorgeous media rich books filled with interactive features, videos, and more. ADE’s support for EPUB3 standard allows you: consistent rendering of audio and video content; dynamic image resizing without loss in clarity; support for multi-column layouts, interactive quizzes, and math formulas. • Choose from different font sizes and five easy-to-read page modes • Highlight your favorite passages and add notes with the built-in bookmarking features • Easily find a word or a character anywhere in the book with the powerful search feature • Use the night mode, or adjust your screen brightness to find the perfect lighting for any environment • Fun stats on how much time you are spending each day to read your book, and more By downloading, you agree to the Terms of Use at, http://www.adobe.com/special/misc/terms.html. Do not sell my information: https://www.adobe.com/privacy/ca-rights-linkfree.html
