VitalSource Technologies Reviews 

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,

constant freezing and trouble loading. can barely use. absolute horrible waste of money. Need these books for school. Offered through my university but just a gross waste of money. Constant error messages saying the page is unresponsive just when trying to read through the chapter. terrible terrible terrible. It's been 2 years. I've reported so many times and they keep saying they are working on it. Refuse to give money back.

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.

I would give a negative star. Total scam. I paid $40.00 to rent an etext. Well it was an access code for Pearson which required an additional $60.00 to access, the access code. Shame on VitalSource and Pearson. Just advertise the true cost instead of the bait and switch!

To be fair, I have to include, the customer service team issued a refund after I complained.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 bought

And now after all this work, i cannot access it anymore after a few hours....