Vitalsource Reviews

this is extremely not-user friendly

this is extremely not-user friendly it took me 2 hs to find out how read the book i had just paid for there was a lot of information on the page but none about where to find the book i had boughtAnd now after all this work i cannot access it anymore after a few hours

To much money for their assortment

For a student from the Netherlands I wouldn t recommend it The price is to high and there where not one of my schoolbooks They advertise with that they have a Dutch store but the haven t

Not a fan

I don t like it for all the reasons stated I thought I would get used to it Today I attempted to purchase a textbook The transaction indicated it was unable to process due to an address problem except it took two payments No text book provided The CSR couldn t tell me how the problems would be fixed but told me calls can t be transferred to someone who knows and problems can t be rectified without an escalation and a call back to me That s a good enough reason for me to go back to traditional hard copy since the system itself is faulty as people have already indicated Both payments have been returned to me as of Oct 27 See email from vitalsource rep Dear My name is C and I am reaching out regarding your recent VitalSource Support request Our system shows 3 attempted transaction s on Oct 26 2022 for a Visa ending in The attempted charge s in the amount of 76 95 AUD did not go through at our end This these charge s should be a hold or pending status on your bank statement and should go away within 10 to 15 business days this is dependent on your bank s policies If the these charge s remain after 15 Business days please contact your bank Thank you for your time and patience Please let us know if you have any further questions Kind Regards

Avoid at all costs

I really wanted to like this website but I have to say my experience has been absolutely horrible My problem is that it lags ALL THE TIME I use it for one of my uni textbooks which is available in very few places in my country this website being one of them It seems like the book is too long has too many chapters for the website to load it properly I have completely given up on using the search function to search for certain words or phrases as the website simply cannot handle it and freezes which sometimes even causes an error message Not ONCE has the search function worked Even something as simple as turning a page causes lagging Reloading the page does not work in the slightest neither does switching browsers The internet connection cannot possibly be the problem either as I have tried both at home at campus at my parents house and many other places There is no other explanation for the lagging than this website being bad My question is - whyyy even distribute a long book if the website can t handle it Do not recommend

no epub download

Total scam they say the ebooks are epub but there s no option to download - the only option is to read through their website or one of their app If I knew that beforehand I wouldn t buy And it seems they re trying to clean their trustpilot page - I suddenly got an email VitalSource Technologies would love to understand your experience better so they ve asked for more details about your review like an order number or email If we don t hear from you within 3 days your review may be taken offline after a year of silence Thankfully I still had my order number so this review won t be taken offline but other ones may well be And a new 5 star review that looks like advertisement showed up

Not fit for purpose

I was recently asked to review an academic book for a journal It was delivered using this vital source platform I have tried to get it to work for two months and today reported to the journal that for the first time in thirty years I would fail to complete a review Frankly I cannot find a good word to say about this platform it s a nightmare to get on and a nightmare to use It s horribly slow counter-intuitive hard to navigate hard to use has no useful functions and lots of bells and whistles of no use whatsoever Today after failing to get on altogether on one device due to a malfunctioning captcha I got the book on another to find that the pages were reduced to a window like a stamp in the corner When I tried to change this the text turned yellow that was the last straw If I had paid money for this experience I would be livid As it is I m just furious

Not user friendly

The website is not user-friendly at all very slow and cumbersome to scroll through workbooks doesn t even offer the basic function of showing 2 pages at once like most other services which makes using it for question practice extremely painful having to flick back and forth between pages Wish I had never purchased the workbook through the website as it feels like everything takes twice as long

The software updated and this meant I

The software updated and this meant I could not read my textbook which I paid 120 for The update happened in the middle of exams when I most needed the book I contacted the company and they refused to refund me or even email me a pdf of the book so I could at least complete my exams Furthermore when I could actually access the book it lagged horribly and the search function did not work at all I Could not recommend against strongly enough I paid top dollar for a product which I suddenly couldnt use during a critical period of my study and they could not have been any less concerned with helping me This company is everything that s wrong with big businesses these days they simply don t care