VitalSource Bookshelf

Download, catalog, and read e-textbooks purchased from the VitalSource Store.

VitalSource Bookshelf is defined as an e-textbook platform. It’s an interactive, completely portable application that lets you acquire, download and read e-books with ease.
This powerful application offers three ways of accessing your books: download, online, and mobile.

It comes packed with many useful features such as the possibility of using notes and highlights which automatically stay in sync no matter where you create them. Anyway, there’s still a lot of criticism about functionalities and features that its interface is missing, especially when it comes to the book reading window. For example, it lacks the possibility of properly zooming and rotating the e-books. When it comes to downsides, I was also a bit bothered by the fact that the acquiring of e-books can be done only using an external browser. In my humble opinion, the application should contain a browser itself, so that when the users press "Shop", they would be able to browse the store inside the app's interface and not in an external browser which can already have lots of opened tabs and slow down the system. Anyway, none of these is a truly remarkable disadvantage that couldn’t be eventually ignored. Unfortunately, there’s a downside that could prove to be too important to overlook: this application uses its own proprietary e-book format, the VBK (VitalBook), and doesn’t support any other formats. You can’t use it to buy, download and read ePubs, PDFs or other e-book formats.

Despite all the cons, its portability and synchronization capabilities make VitalSource Bookshelf quite appealing. Anyway, until it fixes its many problems, I can’t yet recommend it.

Pros

Nice synchronization possibilities
Allows creating, sharing and syncing notes
You can easily highlight topics

Cons

The app should contain a browser so that when the users press "Shop", they would be able to browse the store inside the app's interface and not in an external browser
Supports only VitalBooks - the VBK format
Lacks basic reading options such as zooming and rotating

This program received 1 award

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Comments

Megan M 7 months ago

So many issues with this ereader. I finally opted to go the ebook route for a course I'm taking and this is clunky and incredibly not user friendly. When you zoom and out, the clarity changes - some zoom levels are blurry. The scroll function is far from smooth and jumps large sections at a time. There are large header and footer sections that make the readable section super short and the text is on different sides of the page every other page so your eyes are constantly jumping back and forth from the right to left. AND it looks like there's option to print 10 pages at a time BUT if you do try, there is security in place that ensures that the only thing that prints are black and gray blobs.I've been struggling to get through this reading and am working with Kaplan to see if they have any other solutions without having to duplicately buy the hard copies.I thought this would be more convenient for travelling on the go but absolutely not, I'd opt for the extra $700 for the textbooks for the Kaplan CFFP CFP education courses. Super disappointed in Kaplan for choosing this product.

Madyson M Foley 10 months ago

This software for macos causes so much input lag on my computer, which is one of the newer macs designed for programming... and my school requires me to use it because they have a partnership with this software to access the text books. you need to do better.

Anthony Condotta Last year

Terrible. Cannot handle basic functions such as highlighting despite advertising these features. The more you use said features, the glitchier the software becomes until is completely unusable.

All comments (28)

VitalSource Bookshelf

10.4.16