VitalSource TechnologiesReviews of vitalsource.com

Ingen hjælp overhovedet. Min kode virkede ikke, chatbotten kørte rundt i ring, da den endelig gav mig menneskelig assistance nægtede hun nogen form for hjælp. “Koden er brugt af en anden” var den eneste hjælp, men eftersom jeg lige har skrabet koden er den jo ikke brugt af andre. I så fald er der en fejl fra deres side. Men nej nej det er bare ærgeligt og hun undskylder mange gange ih og åh, men ingenting skete jo. Så absolut til ingen hjælp, og stadig ingen bog online.

I have a lot of e-books from the IET which you can only get through VitalSource. They have just changed the Interface so you can no longer use a mouse wheel to scroll through pages. This makes the viewer useless as reference books for me. I'm going back to paper books.

Highlighting Text Very Slow As a law student, we highlight text. And we copy/paste. With their Mac software, it takes me a full five seconds to mark text, wait for a pop-up menu to appear, click the menu, and wait for it to go away. Same thing with copy/paste. I reported this and they repeatedly denied that there is any problem. First they told me to empty my browser cache (Huh? Their software doesn't run in a web browser and doesn't have a browser cache). Then they asked me to make a video, which I did. Then then told me to uninstall and reinstall the software. So they are doing nothing but hitting the ball over the net to me, as if I can fix their useless software. I hate using this software. I am only writing this review after trying to work with them for weeks to get this resolved.

I recently started taking college classes online and vitalsource was the chosen site for book downloads and what not. after talking to customer support over and over asking simple questions with the responses saying basically for me to contact IT or my course instructor. so here i am trying to get help and the help i get is to seek someone elses help. vitalsource's job should be to reach out and get these answers for me not making more work for me. the automated this is a joke and the so called real support i got was also a joke. i just dont see why i pay for this service when the services arent even offered or even help out

I purchased three e-books for my studies, costing almost DKK 1,000 in total, and I was unable to access a single one of them through VitalSource. I spent around THREE HOURS dealing with VitalSource support trying to resolve the issue. After all that time, instead of actually solving the problem, they closed my case and told me to contact the third-party retailer I had purchased the books from. I did exactly that, only to be told – unsurprisingly – that they could not fix the issue because the problem was with VitalSource and their platform, not with the retailer. Thankfully, the retailer was extremely helpful and ended up refunding me in full. They are now left having to take the matter up with VitalSource themselves and hope that they can recover their money. The whole experience has been beyond frustrating. These are not books I purchased for entertainment – they are required for my studies. Every day I am unable to access them puts me further behind, despite having paid almost DKK 1,000 for them in the first place. I genuinely cannot understand how a company providing digital academic material can offer such poor support when students are completely dependent on being able to access the products they have paid for. Three hours with support, no solution, my case closed, and responsibility simply passed on to someone else. I have honestly never experienced customer service this poor. Extremely disappointing and completely unacceptable.

The lifetime licenses are not lifetime. Get your EBOOK from a more reputable company! The lifetime licenses are not lifetime; they are just a few more years. That is the big problem I have: I paid for an ebook reference book that I will use for longer than 5 years and feel cheated, but the bigger issue is that their app is unstable. The read text feature doesn't work consistently; it sometimes depends on which app I am using (think tablet versus phone, Android versus Mac, etc.), and it's not always broken in the same place. I have other e-book readers that are more reliable and also don't steal books, even the ones I have had for 20 years. Also, add the fact that this is the same predatory company that sold me the book and won't issue refunds for books they didn't ship me, and you have this glorious pattern of a horrible company screwing over students.

My experience with VitalSource Bookshelf has been consistently terrible. The platform is frustrating and unreliable. The reading experience is appalling: browser sessions are ridiculously short-lived, regularly forcing me to log in again while simply trying to read books I have purchased. Printing is unnecessarily painful and heavily restricted. More seriously, I have repeatedly experienced problems receiving and accessing purchased content. Most recently, I successfully redeemed an ebook which appears in my library, but attempting to open it simply results in a “Page Not Found” error. My other books open normally. Customer support has been equally disappointing. Despite explaining the problem, I received generic troubleshooting advice such as clearing cookies and using incognito mode. I tried everything suggested and the book remains inaccessible. There seems to be little ability to investigate beyond the standard support script. An ebook platform has two fundamental jobs: reliably deliver purchased books and provide a decent way to read them. In my experience, VitalSource struggles with both. I have close to 30 books on the platform, so this isn't based on a single encounter. The overall experience has been unreliable, restrictive and needlessly frustrating. I would avoid VitalSource whenever there is an alternative.

Simply terrible. I have bought a medical textbook some time ago (Elsevier). The electronic version dissapeared from my account and customer service is totally frustrating and not helpful (I have writeen email with detailed descitrion of my simple problem; no help just got a automated message, and next day the second message stating that "We followed up recently on your support request (#7353983) with an update from Shulammite, and haven’t yet received a response at this time. As a result, the system has now marked your ticket as solved" Joke :(((