Freading ٤+

I have used Freading for several years and especially liked it while libraries were closed. However, the recent changes make it harder to use, and today my downloads stopped working. The login changes mean that I have to log in for every download. In the past, I could download my entire week at once. Now the app kicks me out and I have to log in each time. I can’t find any help for the download glitch. So, even though I have one book left in my weekly supply I can’t access it.

As a former applications programmer I’d like to know if anyone even bothered to test this before releasing it! Trying to use the Settings to get the page to be readable is almost impossible to use. I have the font size up to its maximum and the size is still incredibly small. Many times when I try to make a change (e.g. the line height), the screen goes blank except for the settings themselves—which are then unusable—and in order to get out of it I need to close the app and reopen it. If any developer is reading this I want them to know that I’m on a 5th generation iPad using the latest iPad OS 14. Please fix this as soon as possible because I can’t possibly read anything on your app until something is done. And by the way, please implement double columns in landscape mode. Thanks. UPDATE: This observation may lead the developers to a fix. I couldn’t get Catherine Aird’s “The Calleshire Chronicles, Volume 3” in any of my other online libraries, so I was forced to use Freading. When I try to increase the font size, only the chapter name and number increase while the main text remains the same. I hope this leads to a solution. Please, please fix this!

I truly enjoy using Freading to read ebooks, but there are two glaring problems with the catalog part of the app. These were cited over a year ago by another reviewer, but the developer hasn’t addressed them. First, either allow the book cover icons to be sized up or add the titles and authors to a text line under or above the icon. Even on my iPad Pro, some of the titles on the covers are completely unreadable. This is a simple fix and shouldn’t take much to implement. The second is that the app loses track of where you are in the list of books when you come back from looking at the book details. This is especially annoying when you’ve gone pages and pages down and now have to page back down again to find your spot. This is so time consuming that I generally have my browser up on GoodReads and look up the title there. This is not the way apps are supposed to work; the user experience is terrible. My library also has Libby which has its own quirks, but suffers from none of these flaws and is much, much more useable.