Bluefire Reader
reviews and complaints

The Bluefire Reader is a pretty good reader for PDF's, ePub's, and ePubs with Adobe DRM. It has the usual features - search, categorize, and so forth, with some nice enhancements.

It is easy to sort books into categories; while in the desired category you press "manage" and checkboxes appear beside the book list. In this mode you can see ALL books. To add or remove from the current category, select (or unselect) the checkbox to the left of the book's title. I think that this is an improvement over the way iBooks and other book readers operate.

I've not had this app crash yet, but I have seen some unwanted behavior; for a while, when I touched or stroked the edge of the page to cause a page turn, it instead caused the page to switch from portrait to landscape orientation. I did not get the app to return to normal operation until I "killed" it by hitting the "home" button twice, holding down on the app icon until the icons began to shake, then held the "minus" sign down until the app "died"'

Other than this, I enjoyed using the app.

Just downloaded the App after someone posted information on KindleBoards/Apple Devices Thread.. We were all looking for ways to read our Overdrive library ebooks without having to buy an extra reader. With this App, now Kindle is the only one out there that doesn't allow Overdrive DRM ePubs and pdfs to be read on the device. This one works so much better than the earlier Sonys where only ePubs seemed to be allowed and the Sony people had no intent of ever fixing the firmware.

Thank you so very much for this beautiful app. The only glitch I have found so far is that I can't seem to get a beige or slightly white page for the background. It is shown in the color list, but doesn't render correctly.

Update: 12/29

I am still enjoying the Bluefire app. The problem that I have run into and that wasn't fixed after the update is that Bluefire still locks up when trying to use PDF files. In order to get it back up and working, I have to reboot the i Pad. iBooks seems to be working better with PDF files for me. ePub books work perfectly with Bluefire.

Update: Thanks for the response...but, no, it’s not an iOS 12 thing, as I’m stuck back on one of the iOS 10 issuances, due to us getting rid of WiFi/home internet (apparently Apple doesn’t let one update via cellular data!).

I am enjoying using this reader so far. Happened upon a mention of it in a post where people were discussing having been kicked from Amazon for not adhering to review guidelines no one can figure out (myself included, having been a customer since 1999). So, having lost all my Kindle books (around 800!), I have been trying a few different ebook reader apps.

I like this better than Books, Kobo and Nook. The aesthetics of the app just work better for my middle-aged eyes. Only issue is that it never keeps my space - it reverts back to the beginning of a chapter, which is a tad annoying if the chapters are long. I have data turned on and have looked for a possible setting correction - no luck. (Oh, and covers don’t show up for me either. I know they are in the actual book files because I’ve put the same books in other apps and the covers are visible.)

The app has a few good thingsgoing for it. It runs on iOS3 and it generally works. The books are easy to load using iTunes and it has a web server which can be used to upload books. Read their FAQ for the tip. App has reasonable number of customizations and overall is OK.
The app has a number of shortcomings. It is very slow with large books and it reflows the book any time settings are saved even if the setting is screen brightness. It is very slow to start and a book with size around 1MB (epub) takes more than 30 seconds to open. Also if one does not lock rotation and rotates ipod it would take 30 seconds to rotate and then 30 seconds to rotate the book. Extremely slow and a deal breaker for me personally. Basically any operation like scrolling, changing font, etc. is extremely slow. Transitioning between parts in the epub file is very slow and there is no indicator so the app appears to hang.
After Stanza quit working on iOS3, I had to upgrade OS in my ipod 2G just to get a better reader selection. Over all this app is usable but only in a pinch if there is nothing better.

Used to be the go-to replacement for my beloved Stanza e-ready app, especially for its highly customizable reading interface (font, page color, etc.). But since the summer of 2012 (I'm writing this in the spring of 2013), this app has been crashing constantly. I remove it from my iOS devices and from my computer, re-install it in whatever the newest version is, and it seems to work normally. I load a few ebooks and can access them without trouble. Then, a day or two later, I try to open the app again on either of my iOS devices but the app refuses to run. It shows the logo and then shuts off, returning me to my device's home screen.

Tech support is at a loss, I have already asked them for help multiple times. The worst part was losing all of the notes I'd taken in this app for a book I was using in my research. I have no idea how to fix the devastating bugs on this app, and apparently neither does Bluefire tech support. Don't waste your time and effort on this app--and don't dare rely on it for annotations.

It's a real shame; this app used to work so well, and now it's worthless.

This is probably the best flow and rendering of ePub documents I’ve seen. It displays clear, high quality text that is a pleasure to read. It’s library capabilities and replication via third party file engines, cloud or private is up dependable and convoluted.
I use OneDrive and File Manager, and one would think that adding documents or folders should be easy. But it isn’t, adding items is an onerous task and does not add them to the library. The collections in the library cannot be organized by the document folder structure, but all appear to be dumped in one huge pot. Each individual document then must be manually moved to a collection manually. Collections are at one level only, so there is no hierarchy for Collection organization.
I can also not see if a document in the library is copied in the apps’ storage or if it is simply a link to the original location. Obviously no internal document / file management exists.
Perhaps I’m incorrect, in which case I would love to correct my initial impressions. Certainly for a product associated with Adobe, it is a huge disappointment.

The only thing good I can say is it lets me read books from my library.

You can't look up a word! Isn't a book the logical place to look up a word? Every other app can do it, why do they block it?

Likewise, you can't copy text. Not a paragraph. Not a sentence. Not a word. Not even a single character. I like what iBooks does, which copies copyright material along with any text you selected to the clipboard. Everybody wins. But this app blocks it all.

Since I can't copy a few key sentences to blog about (you know, to give the book publicity), I try to swipe from the right side of the screen to open up the Notes app on my iPad. But go anywhere near the right side of the screen (swipe or tap), and it goes to the next page. Infuriating.

On an iPad, you can't do 2-up pages, to make it easy to read. No, you just have to crank the margins way up so that a line of text doesn't have 200 characters in it. This is a huge waste of the 12.9" screen.

It does allow you to change the font and linespacing, so that at least is good, although it's about the minimum one would expect from an ebook reader in 2017.

I don’t use Bluefire Reader that often, but today I was really frustrated with a UI issue and saw no feedback medium except for here. I copied one of my thesis papers into Bluefire so I wouldn’t have to navigate between different MS Word files while working on a new paper. My goal was to copy references and/or content for citing in this new paper in a simple manner. However, Bluefire doesn’t actually respond intuitively when you attempt to highlight and copy text. I have a hanging indent for one of my references, and it regularly highlights the 2nd character and only up to a certain point on the second line (if one tries hard enough). I gave up and just started retyping my references and previously cited content.

The app also doesn’t regularly appear as an in-browser option for exporting online text. I.e., say I want to import a file instead of manually printing it. The developers need to look into expanding Bluefire’s presence in the “more options” sections of widely used mobile browsers. I gave the app two stars because I am able to still navigate between papers courtesy of separate apps.

I like this reader - it reads both DRM'd and unprotected ePub books and PDFs.
It allows you to upload files via iTunes and to access eBooks from your local library. The page-turn (backwards/forwards) and the progress-bar are nicely intuitive. It uses inoffensive colors for the screen and is very readable black-on-white text (with a night mode of white-on black if you want this). You can change font fairly quickly and set bookmarks. You can lock the orientation to portrait or landscape (useful for reading in bed, when you tend to tip the device!).

Not sure which people are suffering from slow performance - on my iPod Touch 4G it loads books pretty fast and seems seamless in scrolling back and forth.

So if you are looking for a Stanza replacement for iOS5, this is not a bad one. There are only a few things missing (pinch and swipe font resize, swipe upwards/downwards brightness adjustment, and calibre sync).

Ichiban3 - you need an Adobe reader registration (free) to get the ePub reader to work, even for protection-free content. Go to Adobe to register and get a login. After that, this app works pretty well - it's a good choice.

This reader is super. I'm delighted that it can read the books I bought in the Sony bookstore for my very nice Sony PRS-T1 e:reader. Sony doesn't have an IPAD or IPOD app for its bookstore ebooks. No worry. The Bluefire app is terrific. I love the way it picks up the cover art for the books. So now I have a tablet alternative for reading the Sony books. It also has the ability to download free books direct from Feedbooks onto the IPAD.

I gave it 4 stars because the app has no dictionary, and you have to add books (with the exception of Feedbooks) to BlueFire via your desktop Itunes store (including library books). You can't get the library books by wifi, direct to your IPAD through BlueFire. Still, it's a small negative and easy enough to work around. Otherwise the app is elegant, and delightful to read on. I had been reading library books via tablet on the OverDrive app, but that lacks a search function. BlueFire has a good search function. A search function is in my view critical. So now, BlueFire is my app of choice for reading library books. And for the Sony books, it's essential for reading them on an IPAD! Way to go, Bluefire.

I'm using this app to run a .pdf textbook that was sold to me using Adobe Digital Editions. So far, this is the only app I've found that will open the .acsm file that will "unwrap" the DRM from the book. Adobe touts a number of apps that work with their DRM, but I haven't been able to open the book in any of them but Bluefire. For that, Bluefire gets some stars.

BUT, the app itself is pretty rough. It's extremely slow, and tragically limited in its bookmarking/highlighting functions (which are, of course, critical for textbooks). Even once I've completed the painstaking process of bookmarking some text (which, for this app, is exactly the same as highlighting, and shouldn't be), it removes all the spaces from the text in the list of bookmarks, making the bookmarks themselves completely illegible.

Also, the pinch/zoom function is bad. It's very difficult to zoom into where you like, so you end up zooming and then scanning for the place you want to read. And once you change pages (which is super easy to do by accident), you lose your zoom level, so you have to rezoom on every page.

Final word: I like that there's an app that can open these .acsm files and download and decode ADE books, but this one is amateurish and needs a LOT of work.

Firstly, total crap that the ebook store catalogued within Stanza sold me a book that could not be read in Stanza...with no warning. On contacting them, I got a sorry-boutcha response...but that's my beef with Feedbooks, who I totally blame for exposing me to this app.

I was forced to use this reader to read the book that they would not refund for me to buy elsewhere...and HATE IT!

It has almost no functionality. Yes, you can somewhat customize your view...somewhat. But even turning the page seems to tax this app--that's it primary function!. It is SLOW! The highlighting function doesn't respond properly, so the best you can do is select some part of what you want to refer to, but forget trying to select a phrase or sentence specifically. No dictionary!?! No copy and paste. No percentage read. Less than pleasing library view. Poorly organized app with no features.

THIS APP DESTROYS MY READING EXPERIENCE! It makes me mad every time I open it.

I shouldn't have to submit myself to hours of research to figure out the methodology of how to buy and use digital books. Nor should I have to jump through hoops to use this crappy one. What's going on with Stanza? I want my Stanza back!

Avoid this if you can. It only brings heartache.

I get it... the developer states the app had to be rewritten. But in doing so as an overwriting of version 3, verses a companion Version 4, it made my bookmarks on some of my version 3 book worthless. The bookmark/notes are there and highlighted - but reverence page 0. (It’s hit or miss - there doesn’t seem to be a pattern.) That means you can’t click on the bookmark in “bookmarks” and be taken to the page. That’s not my definition of progress.

This used to be my go to ebook reader. Now, with no system font, a couple of my books are in a font 1. Absolutely unreadable. I thought I”d just zoom in then. Nope. Unsupported.

Surely there were options available without forcing an update on to us. GoodNotes, as an example, maintained two versions and their users could pick which they wanted. I have 0, none, nada, zip new epub books that this new app was created to support. The 673 books - epub mostly with a few pdf’s - did not ask nor need this “upgrade” that lost what I loved about Bluefire Reader.

As others have noted, the ability to change brightness, the ease to turn pages... the features that made Bluefire our beloved program are now a thing of the past.

I’ve found a new app and will be slowly making the transition. Goodbye old friend - you were great before your upgrade.

I like that it’s more customizable than other readers, but there are a couple things that annoy me.
1) Every other reader I’ve used, when you leave the app and come back.. it brings you directly to the book you were reading. This app brings you to the library instead. I know I can just press ‘now reading’, but it’s an unnecessary step. Once you’re in the middle of a book, odds are high the you’re gonna continue reading that book!
2) the app hangs frequently! I can be reading and flipping thru the pages, when all the sudden it doesn’t respond. Swipe, swipe.. nothing. It’s not the iPad because I can switch apps and do whatever else I want while the app is hung. This happens on multiple newer devices. If you give it 10 seconds or so it seems to come back, but it’s pretty ridiculous. The app has one purpose and that’s to display text. It has all kinds of time to have the next page ready while I’m reading the current page *** added note here, when it hangs it always seems to be at the end of a chapter
3) this is minor, but with all the freedom you have to pick your background and text color.. you don’t have the freedom to pick a highlight color. I had found an interesting color combo, went to highlight something and it didn’t highlight because of my color scheme
4) also minor, when dealing with RGB color selection, I’m used to seeing 0-255.. but for some reason this app uses 0-100.

Like a number of others, I wouldn’t use this app if I had any other choice. I have begged Hackett (which forces me to use it for academic desk copies) to switch to downloads usable on Kindle. The highlighting function works miserable and is a tedious trial to use.

UPDATE: This is a warning that unlike Kindle, Nook, and Google’s Play Books, Bluefire makes nor retains no index or pointers to your books. This means that if you do a restore or get a new iPad, your library will be gone entirely—unless you have gone through (and keep up) the tedious back-up outlined here:
1. Connect your device to your computer and access it via the device icon in the upper left of the iTunes main screen.
2. Once selected, you should see a button for "Apps" in the main iTunes screen. Please select it.
3. From the "Apps" screen, scroll to the bottom where you will see a section labeled "File Sharing," and you should see the Bluefire Reader icon.
4. Select the Bluefire Reader icon, and you will be able to see all of the books in your Bluefire Reader library.
5. Highlight all of the books in your library, and click the "Save To" button, and save the books to a location of your choice on your computer.

Update 10-2016
Still a tedious way to read any ebook file, and still with a miserably recalcitrant highlighting facility. I try to dissuade in the strongest terms any of my students from using any e-book that requires this reader.

The app is pretty good overall but it doesn’t highlight text properly in PDF books. This is a serious flaw if you read textbooks or other books you want to highlight a lot.

The problem is that, when you hold your finger on a word, the app is very slow to recognize that you are trying to begin highlighting (up to several seconds) and you have to place your finger exactly over the first letter of the word (not anywhere on the word). If you don’t manage to do this - my success rate is maybe 50% after weeks of practice - you may not be able to manually reposition the cursor to begin at the first letter before the highlight feature disengages. After you highlight several short passages the app seems to get “fatigued” and it can take up to 10 seconds for the highlight to register.

You also can’t delete a highlight on the page - you have to go into the notes section and find the page where the highlight is, which is very time-consuming. Also, if you don’t manage to exactly hit the first letter of a word but do manage to manually drag the cursor to the beginning of the word, the notes section doesn’t recognize that you want to start the highlighting at a point earlier than where you first put your finger, and cuts off the first part of the word.

Highlighting on the Bluefire app is Kafkaesque. It’s completely baffling how a developer could get a basic feature so wrong. I have no problem highlighting PDFs using the iOS Kindle, GoodReader, or Apple Books apps, but those apps don’t work with Adobe DRM protected PDFs. If these apps can get it right, it’s not clear why Bluefire can’t.

This app works great. I am sooooooo happy.

At first I tried to just read my protected Adobe Digital Edition epub format library book using the Adobe Digital Edition software on my MacBook Pro, since my Apple mobile devices are not directly supported. But I really, really prefer reading books on my iPad. This app makes that possible when when you authorize it on your Apple device using your Adobe ID and password.

Only thing that confused me at first: even after I authorized the Bluefire Reader app on my iPad with my Adobe ID and password, and transferred a library book onto the device from my MacBook Pro, I could not at first open the book to read it on the iPad. Turned out that I needed to be online when I first tried to open the book, so the library loan itself could be verified.

The book at first showed up on the Bluefire Reader default shelf as sort of greyed out with a circle-slash logo, so I figured something wasn't quite right. When I clicked on the book to open it, the error message I got just said something like the book was "not available right now, so try later."

Finally I thought to flip on the WiFi on the iPad and try again. Then when I clicked on the book in Bluefire Reader, it said "Verifying loan info" with a little spinning gear logo... After a few seconds, the book opened up fine. Now I can read that book offline with no problems.

Thanks to all who helped make it possible to read protected Adobe Digital Edition books on Apple mobile gear. I don't live near a "real" library, so the digital library loans are a wonderful feature for me.

I (try to) use it for textbooks, with many images & diagrams. I have a ton of problems with this software. I use Adobe Reader (awesome!) for all non-secured PDFs. I only use this program for secured textbooks when I an in class/lab. At home I open these locked PDFs in the Adobe software (with no problems).

The program constantly freezes and has to be closed. Although this does not always "reset" the software.

It takes maybe a minute to change pages. It makes reading take forever! Once a page loads it is slow to zoom in or change orientation. The slow "thinking" also makes it impossible to highlight/lookup/ etc.

The navigation controls often get "stuck" and obscure the text top & bottom. This makes it hard to navigate to specific pages, since the program slider counts all pages, not textbook pages.

The links do not work consistently (maybe 5% of the time they work). For example, if I go to the contents and tap on a chapter/pg the program takes me to the last page I was reading, not the one linked (by the textbook authors).

No page numbers in the table on contents nor a detailed table of contents for easy navigation. It is also very annoying that there is only a detailed TOC. It is very frustrating to navigate to a specific chapter due to the scrolling & freezing. It would be better to have all the chapters listed and clicking on each one to expand it to see the detailed contents (and maybe a button at the top to expand all, in case you wanted to skim them all); or create two different TOC (just like you find in all textbooks).

The software is not easy to use due to all these problems. If you need DRM PDFs, this is better than nothing, but don't expect quality with textbooks.

A cautionary tale... RC is Santa’s little brother and has a crazy theory that sometimes it’s better to take things away from people than to give them things. This made him the laughing stock of the North Pole and led to a big argument with Santa. Now RC wears green and lives at the South Pole. He contends his theory still has merit. Can an elf and a human sister help prove it? An elf named Marmel is the head of the labeling department at the North Pole. His job to make sure that all humans get sorted onto either the “Naughty” or “Nice” list. But this Christmas, it seems that this no one has been listed on the naughty list. This has never happened before during Marmel’s 107 years in the labeling department. It’s due to North Pole Santa’s new rule. This makes Marmel suspicious, so he decides to dig into the records, and the Krumwerth family catches his eye. He deems them to be “certifiably hopeless” and definitely, undoubtedly Naughty! Well the fact is, they’ve been on the Naughty List for two years running, so he must officially inform them that a third time will put them on the Permanent Naughty List. Muriel makes his appearance to Amanda Krumwerth to deliver the warning. Shocked to be talking to an elf, she nevertheless takes Mermel’s warning to heart. She begins the struggle to get her family members back into the Christmas spirit. As you read, I think you’ll notice some parallels with Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Author, Canfield puts these age-old themes into a thoroughly modern setting. For example none of the family.’s devices are functioning any everyone is totatally dependent on being online. Now they are hard up to find something to do. I found the book to be a bit wordy and preachy, but think there is a large audience who will find the book redeeming with a happy ending. Maybe even take to heart to put down the devices and focus on others.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to the folks at Bluefire Productions. I've been amassing a fairly impressive e-book library, and I desperately wanted to be able to read any of my books on my iPad. Thanks to apps from Stanza, Kindle, and Nook, I could access even DRM-protected books -- _except_ for those PDFs and EPUB books protected by Adobe's digital rights management system (Adobe Digital Editions). I was still chained to my computer to read all of my ADE books. Until now.

Not only does Bluefire offer this _free_ app that enables me to read all my ADE books, but getting them to my iPad is uncomplicated. Step 1: Open the ADE app on your computer. Step 2: Open iTunes. Step 3: Connect your iPad to your computer via USB. Step 4: Click on your iPad in iTunes. Go to the Apps tab. At the bottom of the page you'll find Bluefire listed, click on that. Step 5: Go to the folder on your computer that contains your ADE books (usually called "Digital Editions"), control-click the books you want to read on your iPad, and draaaag them over to Bluefire in iTunes. Immediately and as if by magic, the books will be synched onto your iPad (without even having to do an overall synch), and there they are, ready to be read.

So, great app, thank you very much. What I need next:
1. Make the app more stable. I've had it freeze or bomb on me a couple of times.
2. Bookmarks, highlights and annotations: The bookmarks and annotations I made on my computer do _not_ come over onto the iPad, and in Bluefire, I can only create bookmark annotations. How about highlighting passages?
3. Currently books in the library can be arranged by "Recent," "Title," and "Author." This is fine when one has only a few books on a few subjects. But the really serious reader or researcher needs a way to collect books into sub-libraries. Do I want my medical textbooks mixed in with my favorite mystery stories? No. I need a way to be able to separate them into different folders or into sub-libraries.

I hope the feedback is helpful. You are definitely on the right track with this this. Thank you!

I did some flying this week and realized that the app was working when my iPad was in airplane mode with no wifi. As soon I had wifi again the problems reappeared. Still an issue. I don't want to turn wifi off every time I use the app.

I got excited about the update. Initially it was still locking up and the pages were freezing but after a few days it began working. Today, again, it was not working. Not being able to consistently turn pages is a real bummer. My other reading apps are working. It seems to be just Bluefire.

When it works I'd give it 5 stars. I love the up and down swipe to adjust brightness. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be consistent.

This is the first review I've ever written because usually I don't care enough but I hate this app. I have to use it because ebrary requires it to read their library ebooks and I need it for a huge class assignment. This app freezes like crazy, takes over a minute and a half to highlight one line of text, is almost impossible to get exactly the text you want highlighted... It took me over an hour just to read 20 pages of pretty large print text just because it freezes and takes forever to highlight! This is a huge waste of time. And I can't even close the app and go to other stuff while I wait for it to process my highlight because it'll just lose the highlight and I'll have to start over. Hate it.

This app is better than Adobe Digital Editions, but it still doesn’t work that well with every import. I just bought a book from the Dutch online store bol.com and I can’t press on one word to select it. It selects the whole sentence and when I try to adjust the selection to just that word, it behaves erratically, selecting the whole paragraph or some other amount of text. This makes it impossible to select a word to look up in the dictionary and also to highlight text. The sample book that was in the app library when I downloaded it (Treasure Island) doesn’t have this problem, so maybe it’s not the app, but as a user this was my experience and it has never happened with Apple Books. I wish e-books were more portable.

This app is horrible and if I didn't have to use it for class I would never suggest it to anyone. They say they wanted to provide an app for readers - BS - this app is useless! It is slow - the highlight features and other functions barely work or don't work at all. You have to login using your adobe account and instead of using adobe features and tech they try to separate themselves like they are providing a one-of-a-kind service when all they provide it an irritating app that tries to mimic iBooks.

If they had any real brains over at the company they would sell to someone who knows what the hell they are doing.

Do not download ever - if you don't have to, for the love of every eBook downloaded and every paperback written - DO NOT DOWNLOAD.

My apple system and bluefire reader app are both updated. I log with my library which offers books for bluefire reader. After identification I ask for a book, then I get an email from the library with the link to bluefire reader and there I could download the book, or access reading on line. Recently the links from the library does not work. I have done this for several years without problem . All of a sudden it does not work, just can’t download. I called the library and they tell me there is a bug with Apple that has not been fixed for several weeks, and in the meantime try to use the google chrome browser which they claim works. Google is up to date, but not Apple. I will have to go to the library so they can show me how to do it with Google Chrome.

It shows promise. When they add some much needed features I think it will be a good option for reading DRM books. But it NEEDS orientation lock! I can't believe that some of the main ereaders out there don't offer this. I don't always read my books sitting upright. Until this feature is added I'll stick to Stanza. It's a deal breaker for me. Also the ability to save custom color themes like the previous BN version of it's ereader (not the new Nook app) would be great. As well as having more control over the fonts, sizes and spacing, etc.. The app is a bit slow and the interface is pretty clunky but maybe that will improve with another update. Overall I can only give it 2 stars at this time, but will check back for future updates to see if it's improved.

This app is infuriating. I am forced to use this app in order to read ebooks from my university library (through "ebrary"). It is impossible to highlight text. Either it highlights several lines of text more than I want or the highlight function doesn't appear. There is a huge lag between selecting text to highlight (when I can get it to work) and from the highlight actually shows up. The tapping mechanism to move to the next page often gets confused with the tapping mechanism to pull up the tool/option bar. Additionally, it takes way too long to skip ahead to different sections of the book. This makes referencing to different chapters in class extremely frustrating. This is a poorly made and obviously cheap app that I am being forced to use. If I could I would give it zero stars.

I struggled to find anything good to say about the Bluefire Reader. But here it is - it is the only way to read an electronic book for a college course I am taking.
OK, now for the drawbacks: I cannot highlight any text or else it locks the app.
I cannot turn a page or it locks the app.
It is not very user friendly. Instead of page numbers on the scan bar, there a different set of numbers.
The app is ultra slow to respond to any selections - to open the book, to go to a page, etc.
And when I get frustrated by the slowness and begin banging my iPad against everything around me, you guessed: it locks the app..
In a nutshell, if you can avoid this app, do so. I would gladly have paid triple what I paid for this book to simply have had it mailed to me in old fashioned paperback style.

I wanted to try the ePub format in Stanza. Bought a book at BookOnBoard and it instead went to Bluefire. Tried it in that app and was disappointed in the lack of options that I'm used to in the Kindle app (and wanted to experience in Stanza).

So I changed my setting at BooksOnBoard to download to Stanza. But it purchased the book before I was ready and sure enough it had to be downloaded to Bluefire (not the fault of BooksOnBoard as it was locked to goto Bluefire for whatever reason).

Still, the lack of changing the background color to anything beyond white and black (Stanza has more than you can imagine), font type and color, highlight, underline and more freely annotate at specific places are all limitations compared to even the worst readers. Hope that improvements are coming soon!

Having used a variety of ebook readers on my iPad 2 (nook, iBooks, Stanza, CloudReaders, Play Books, Kindle), I can say that the Bluefire Reader is among the most frustrating that I have used. I use this reader for electronic versions of two of my law school textbooks. For my purposes, this reader has offered nothing but frustration. Although the reader functions adequately as a strict reader (i.e., if all I do is read text), it fails as a textbook reader. Whenever I try and highlight text, or take notes, the process is clumsy enough to render those functions useless. Perhaps most frustratingly is that most text searches crash the app. By that I mean that if I search for a particular term the app will go into the iPad version of the spinning beach ball before finally crashing. This behavior eliminates one of the key advantages of an electronic v. regular textbook.

First off, I'd like to say that anyone accustomed to a quality reader (I like Stanza) should stay away from this if the book format allows it.

I have the iPhone 3GS and have been having problems with it after exiting the application. There are problems with the margin (a lot of wasted space) that means you either make it big enough to read and cannot annotate something easily, or you can annotate without waging war on the touchscreen...but cannot read the text. There is also a delay turning pages and updating settings.

I only use it because some of the books I purchase only download to Bluefire- I am currently contacting the book store seeking a download link that is compatible with Stanza.

Even reading books I love is debilitatingly slow on Bluefire.

The only benefit is that it shows more text on the annotations than Stanza, but that is a small price to pay when using a quality eReader.

My professor for our online class had us buy our book online or in print, I happened to buy both. In order to view my textbook (for the time being waiting on my hard copy) it needed to use this app. At first all the features it provides would have been quite amazing, (highlighting, bookmarking, note taking, some even have different types of flipping of pages hahaha) which is why I gave them an extra star.

But in the end, if this app is too laggy with everything you try to do with these features, it makes studying that much harder. Its quite difficult to get into a reading flow when you have to pause for 30 seconds to the next page. unexcuseable bluefire reader! This app really needs to fix its lag problem, everyone seems to experiencing the same thing.

Good thing I bought a hard copy, if it wasn't so laggy this would be an app I would use in the future.

I'm using an iPad 2 with the updated system upgrade. iOS 6

Useless if my books are full of blank pages.

As of late reading on my iPad has been difficult due to the app freezing and crashing. It was happening every once in a while and now it’s almost daily. Not my iPad — it performs fine.

Aside from that I’d like to see the library updated, it’s clunky and not aesthetically pleasing.

This app is terrible. My books from school do not download & go off to the nether of the internet somewhere. The “help” is terrible with no contact info. The navigation is awful throughout the app too. And lastly, someone I have a PDF of the Dropbox app that I cannot delete. An amazing waste of time & energy

I used to be able to swipe up or down to darken or lighten page. Important to me. Gone now.

Also dark mode is white text on grayish background instead of rich, easy to read black.

Seems to be less adjustable in settings than before. Will probably delete. I should never have updated.

Update: just deleted it. So sorry, but have old version on IPad. Will not update. Not usable for me anymore.