Ebook Reader 12+

I bought a book and downloaded it, that was quite easy. But the formatting was horrible: words would run over from one line to another without breaking at the end of a syllable or being hyphenated e.g. ‘loneliness’ was broken into ‘lo’ at the end of one line and ‘neliness’ at the start of the next. On top of this, the lines were so close together they were hard to read.

I complained and was told, ‘I'm afraid that our Ebook Reader app is having a few difficulties with the formatting of some files.’ It was suggested I try another app. Many hours of fruitless effort later, I have given up.

However, they did make a considerable effort to sort the problem out for me, and then refunded the purchase price of the book when that didn’t work. In short, good people managing a useless product (for the book I bought).

Several of the features don’t work as described. Zoom with a pinch doesn’t work, turn pages with a tap or swipe doesn’t work, it just turns to the start of the next chapter. Each chapter is just a continuous block of text that I have to scroll down to read, no individual pages or margins. The font size increase and decrease only works on the title pages, not the main text, so is uncomfortably small on an IPad. Pagination takes a along time when making any changes.

It’s good but the user experience could be improved, namely;
- ability to have greater granularity in the font size. 100% is too small and 125% is the next step up but this is too large
- ability to see pagination / % progress through at the bottom of the screen
- ability to look up words for meaning / reference
- some books don’t paginate properly, e.g., ‘The Spy and the Traitor’ (and there’s been others), it’s just one continuous scroll down per chapter. If you’re half way down therefore and exit the app, it takes you back to the top when you pick it up again and you have to then try and find your place.