ReadAnywhere

• Free

Last verified 4 Sep 2026

4.6 10329 ratings · App Store

1. 1/5Just poorly designed

   I’m a new college student, and this is my first apple review. I only had this app for five minutes before I threw my headphones off in frustration. ////HOW//// can you design an E-textbook app, WITH an audio reading option, and then not allow audio to play in the background???????? My screen has to be on the entire time??? Also, there is no scroll for audio speed. I am stuck with this app’s version of “Slow” “normal” and “fast”, which none are the speed I need. Also, the audio rendering is horrible. No pauses for commas or periods, just random pauses. It’s extremely hard to put together. The robotic voice really does not help either, can’t AI do it at this point?? Also, using pause/play on Airpods does not work for this app, or at least not for me. It kept switching between the audio and other music apps I have, it would never pause, and it’s incredibly frustrating when I’m just trying to listen to an audio version of the textbook while I’m working or driving. I genuinely cannot believe this app was released with all these issues…

   Real talk fr · 4 Sep 2026

2. 4/5Impressions from a VoiceOver perspective

   I’m actually really impressed. This app was designed for the efficient VoiceOver user: action items that move between sections, a chapter slider that is easy to locate by touch, and significantly less verbosity that I have to endure on a computer. Plus it doesn’t initially struggle with focus issues when I navigate between sections like I experience on the web. I’m currently doing an adaptive assignment—and it works well, except for when I return to the question after perusing the book. To return to the question content, I must invoke screen recognition. There was also some thought that went into the annotations feature: I can use the selection rotor to select text; unfortunately, it stops working reliably after the first entry. As a screen reader user, I would use this app since it is way more convenient than turning on my computer. **Edit** matching terms with definitions + writing in text boxes if you browse through the book are both unreliable on iPad

   Wenwei Fisher · 4 Sep 2026

3. 1/5Horrible for adult students that have busy lives

   I rely on etextbooks because with kindle and other PDFs I can have my phone read the pages aloud to me while I am cooking, cleaning, commuting and managing my family. Moreover, I have issues with my eyes where I cannot stare at screens for long periods of time so I reserve screen times for when I have papers and online research. I can understand not allowing copy and pasting for copyright reasons but spoken screen and spoken content with iOS does not work at all for this app which is absolutely absurd. Why would you prevent people that can’t see digital content very well from being able to have the content read to them?!?! If I were any more blind than I currently am I would not be able to use this app at all so those with vision impairment should STAY AWAY!! The “highlight and speak” feature worked the first day I tried this app and has not worked since, a feature that is also poor because you cannot pause long segments so you have to highlight very short segments at a time (which is extremely inconvenient when driving). Since that KY worked one time I have deleted and redownload this app 5 times and it still dies not work. I hope professors in the future will stay away from McGraw Hill products all together because the snout of money paid for this textbook and the lack of accessibility is absolutely outrageous.

   Caleewa · 4 Sep 2026

4. 3/5Functional yet frustrating

   I teach biology at the college level, and frequently require to access the textbook; during class, when helping students, or reviewing the material privately. The app suffers a few standard QOL features that the developers could hopefully implement with ease: (1) a toggle “view installed ebooks only” would remove all of the clutter; (2) Stop timing us out the minute we leave to do something; it’s “my book” on “my tech”, and there’s just no reason why it can’t remember exactly where I was when I come back. Perhaps this is a memory limitation, but I find that if I swap over to Explorer or a note-taking app, if I spend any amount of time there, and come back, I’ve lost my place and have to scroll through the clutter to find my book again. A harder thing to enable would be a layer that lets me directly write on the book like a PDF reader (or a hard copy!). I miss, very much, the ability to draw and write in the margins, or highlight in my own way. It’s tempting to download a PDF just so that can be done! Otherwise, it’s a solid app that displays the text exactly the way the authors intended. It just needs some polish.

   Ajippolito · 4 Sep 2026

5. 1/5Absolute Crap

   I don’t understand how such a big company like McGraw Hill could come up with such an utterly lousy app. I would give it 0 stars if I could. I am being forced to use this app for school because of school, but if you have ANY CHOICE WHATSOEVER, DO NOT USE THIS APP. You’re better off taking pictures of every single page of your textbook and using photos on your phone than using this app. The entire app is the most inconvenient and poorly formatted. First of all, “continuous scroll” is the only option. I put continuous scroll in quotes because it isn’t even continuous. The pages are all strangely different lengths and the application stops you at the end of a page so you have to swipe multiple times before you can access the next page. Moreover, the markup features are absolutely pathetic. There are very few markup options; they have four highlighter colors and don’t even have a handwriting option. Also, seeing as this app is geared towards iPads, the fact that Apple Pencil does not work with it is absurd. You also have to select the text you want to markup by dragging your finger around for an unholy amount of time before the markup options even show up, because as i mentioned earlier, you cannot draw on the book with Apple Pencil.

   kaylee1224 · 4 Sep 2026

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