I like the way this app looks, and it is simple to navigate, however, I’ve had some dealbreaker issues with it, specifically with audiobooks. I’ve seen at least one other review that had things I experienced, including overheating phone, and fast battery drainage (which are probably related to each other). i’ve also experienced it starting a chapter and then 30 to 40 seconds in it’ll skip back to the beginning. Another issue that has been very frustrating, and to me the biggest dealbreaker, is that it downloaded an audiobook and broke it into an insane amount of chapters. It was the third Game of Thrones book, which is a nearly 50 hour audiobook, and it broke it into 844 small sections which were titled chapters. It makes it very time-consuming and frustrating to find a spot if you lose your place. Also, it caused the downloading of it to take a long time, I don’t have the technical knowledge as to why, but took like an hour. It also froze while downloading and I deleted and re-installed the app and still had the same issue with download time. I hope they can fix this stuff, but I saw that somebody else had a battery drainage problem from like a year before this, so not sure how common it is.

Leaving a review as it looks like the CS team is pretty responsive. I really like the interface to search for books, which lets you drill down by genre and subgenre but also allows you to View All. Much better than Libby in the ease of use there. I wish there was a “save for later” type functionality - maybe someday. :)Where things fall apart for me is the audiobook playback. Biggest issue is that it heats up my phone and absolutely chews through my battery - doing nothing but listening (through Bluetooth headphones, connected to my home wifi) for the ~90 minutes drained my battery (iPhone 11, 75% performance per Settings) from ~75% to ~30%. Another quibble is that when moving from one track to the next, it seems to play the new track for 15-90 seconds and then jump back to the beginning. That’s a little weird and kind of annoying, but not a dealbreaker for me like the battery issue.

Quite possibly one of the worst reading apps I’ve ever used. Only had it on my phone for a few days but in the short time I used it I found so many issues. The biggest problem I saw is when I tried borrowing an audiobook. I waited maybe five minutes for it to download and afterwards when I tried to open it the screen would go black and the app would crash. I tired to open it again and the same thing kept happening. I couldn’t even listen to the book I borrowed. On top of that the app takes up so much storage on my phone. Even after browsing and borrowing one book the “documents and data” it took up was around 2 gb! I also thought the search engine is awful, the first results you see are never related to whatever you entered into the search bar. When you tap on a book to see more details like a plot summary there’s nothing, just a black square. I also wished there was some functionality where you could save titles to a list, like the tagging system in the libby app. Overall I wanted to like this because the catalog was fairly extensive but the app is practically unusable for me. Please please update it.

This app was promoted to me on Facebook touting its access to the California State library. After downloading the app, I discovered it gives access to the Univeristy of California library. That sounded great!However, I can’t find any way to filter a search in the app. For example, I typed in “Spalding Gray” looking for scripts by the famous monologist. It brings up every single title and author with the word “gray”. Perhaps they don’t have anything by Spalding Gray, but it would be nice to just get no results if that’s the case.I wish libraries would quit coming up with new apps to access their books. Happy with the Libby app, which gives access to tons of libraries and has great filters on their search engine. I will keep my eye on Palace to see if it improves, but meanwhile, I’ll be using Libby.