Perlego: Your online library 4+

Great selection of academic texts, but buggy interface..

Perlego is a lifesaver if you don't have access to a good academic library. And perhaps even more convenient than one if you do. But the interface leaves a bit to be desired: the scrolling is somewhat buggy, for instance, where the top and bottom margins may stretch; the viewing options are rather limited in many cases; there's no copy or citation option for referencing, etc. So while there's room for improvement, I'm nevertheless very glad it exists!

Developer Response ,

Hi Ashraf,

Thank you for sharing your feedback with us! While we work to add these features on the app, you can find a citation generator as well as a copy and paste option on the website. You'll also find the formatting of the book you're reading may be the reason for your limited viewing options. ePUBs will have more settings to choose from. I hope this helps!

Great premise, but the app needs a lot of work

I really love the premise of this company. I discovered it in college and have never stopped using it since. Unfortunately, the best way to experience Perlego is on a computer. Their website has more features, less glitches, and is overall holds much better experience. I want to love the app, but it is, unfortunately, subpar. My books download and are fine for a while, but after a few days of reading, chapters go missing and the books take forever to load. The interface is a bit wonky to navigate as well. Despite all this, I’ll still keep using Perlego. It’s been such a help in saving money and in exploring new titles and authors. I hope the app does improve!

Intuitive app but the reader has issues

First of all, nice and clean interface and the interface is pretty intuitive. I was really happy with the whole experience until i got into the reader to read a book.

It took me a while to get used to the motion of swiping to the next page. From using regular apps and ebooks such as apple’s Books app, I am used to the fluid motion of swiping between pages. However, this app requires more of a prolonged hold and swipe which is very unintuitive and has a bit of a learning curve. I’d urge you to please make the swiping gesture more seamless.

What grinded my gear the most is that, images inside the books appear to be cropped. As the image in the book is apparently of dimensions that is beyond what will cleanly fit on the screen, it chose to zoom in and cropped the borders with no way to zoom out. Now I can’t clearly see the content. Being unable to see the content is a huge deal to me given that it is an educational textbook. I hope that you’ll fix it soon.

Except for these, really neat app. Couldn’t give more stars just because it fell short where it was needed the most :(

Developer Response ,

Hi there,

Thanks so much for sharing your feedback here! I'm glad you find our app intuitive overall. While our PDFs are formatted on the app to scroll, our ePUBs are formatted for swiping instead. This is supposed to imitate reading a book and there's no need for holding down the page while swiping, just a simple swipe across the screen will do. We do appreciate the choice between scrolling and swiping would be preferred and we have began looking into this customisation to have in the future, so be on the look out for updates!

As for images appearing cropped, would you mind reaching out to help@perlego.com and letting us know what book(s) this is happening with so we may take a closer look? If ever there's any issues with a title, you can always let us know and our engineers will be happy to look into it for you 😊

We look forward to hearing from you soon!


The Perlego Team