John Wiley & Sons Reviews 18

John Wiley & Son are useless they sent the wrong book, I ordered a Haynes Manual How to Build A Campervan, and I received a Porsche 924 manual. I have emailed several times and still received no reply. Rubbish service!

I agree with the reviewers - I would give 0 stars if I could as well. My hospital subscribed to a Wiley journal through EBSCO and was told for almost 4 months, AFTER they were paid, that we didn't have access. We finally got access this week after having to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops. Their sales rep won't extend the subscription for the time we were supposed to have access and they offered no recompense or apologies for their complete lack of professionalism and poor record-keeping. Avoid subscribing to any of their journals if you can!

This company is a catastrophe.

Their customer service is a HOT MESS. Their website access to account information just sends error after error, and when you call them to have it fixed, they just give you the run-around for months until you hopefully forget about it?

I am going to work with my company librarian to find an alternative, because this is just unsustainable, and they seem to have no willingness whatsoever to fix it.

If I could rate this a 0 I would.
Literally the worst and most stressful returns process I’ve seen in my life. Returns policy and process like something out of the Middle Ages, so outdated for the 21st century and a 48 hour wait for responses to emails made it very difficult to discuss this return with the company. Avoid at all costs especially if you’re a student and every penny counts as their inability to refund (or desire to make it as difficult as possible) has cheated me out of a lot of money. I returned the item on 6th October 2025 and still no refund.

As an author, the prospects for publishing with Wiley were positive at the start, met with excitement and they seemed engaged. But I feel there's a disconnect somewhere. Communication doesn't seem transparent enough, and there were early red-flags that I just don't want to deal with later.

Bought an eBook related to my new job, to prepare before I start. It is not an eBook. You have to be logged in to their website/App to be able to read it, and it takes ages to move from one page to another. They are mis-selling by calling it an eBook as you can not read it anywhere, you must be connected to the Internet. Good luck with that when you want to read on the train, tube,...
Cherry on the cake: I contacted their Help Desk asking to switch to paper copy, and offered to pay the difference in price. The answer was: "Computer says No", and wanted to have me troubleshoot the "issue" in 5 different steps, including "try Chrome".

I signed a publishing agreement with Wiley Book Writers in March 2024. They promised to do 4 weekly advertisements per week, distribute 500 copies of my book to bookstores across the country, and sales goals were included in the contract. For that I was asked to pay $3000 up front to print the books. The balance would be due after 8 months if the sales goals were met. They were not and no books were ever distributed to any book stores. The advertisements were done in a timely manner and I was pleased with them. I cancelled my agreement with them in November and requested a refund because the books were never distributed. It is now December 16, 2024 and all I'm getting is the promise of a phone call that never seems to happen. Our relationship has been great until I finally told them I wanted my money back. Now just silence.

I bought a Wiley Trading Series book on Amazon, only to find out that the book print went terribly wrong. There is no upper margin, so the texts and charts are cut in half. That's throughout the entire book!!!!
I wonder how it is possible. No quality control!!! The book is useless despite being pricy!!!!
I bought many books, including Wiley's, and never saw such a thing! Shame!!!!!

I had the experience with the publisher from the other side as an author.

The company is ridiculously unprofessional, especially when it comes to quality of the submission requirements and the inspection afterwards. Despite the fact that I did all the corrections on the manuscript they requested they kept returning me the manuscript that there are no changes. After I wrote an angry email to publisher, they finally had a look on the manuscript and realized that changes were already made - twice.

I mean, journal publishers is a long standing problem in science where authors do most of the work and the standards of publishers is getting very low and I see this steep decline over time since 2015. While the publisher did very little so far, they obviously already sent me an email to pay the publication fee. I think this is a disgrace for the whole community and that is why projects like Arxiv are so succesful.

It is also noteworthy that going through publication process itself with Wiley is nightmare. You go through a series of registrations and various website with questionable quality which easily makes you feel you are being scammed. Then finally when you prepare the PDF, you realize that you have to submit the preprint in docx format which is least popular format for publishing in computer science.

My experience with Wiley.com left me feeling misled. I bought an ebook thinking I'd get the full version, but when I tried to print it, there were print limitations and watermarks. Their excuse? "Ebooks come with a watermark for copyrights." Keep in mind nowhere on the product page do they disclose these two points. Something that would definitely deter people from purchasing ebooks from them. Nor is it on their article page about accessing an ebook. Definitely, bad business practices by them. Be careful when buying from Wiley.com.

Popular literature publisher. However, Wiley is a low-grade, low-quality source of multiple medical journals. Though many of their journals claim to be "peer-reviewed," they openly allow studies to be published for products that have been sponsored by the manufacturers of those products. According to Yale, "Studies sponsored by industry were 3.6 times more likely to have conclusions favorable to industry than studies without that support."[1]

Wiley contributes to the scientific industry's dangerous "Replication Crisis," a human-harmful result of studies performed in unprofessional manners [2], such as by hosting papers written by corrupt authors sponsored to give good results by manufacturers. The Replication Crisis has resulted in nearly 40% of scientific studies being non-reproducible a second time. You can see one example of Wiley publishing a corrupt study sponsored by a manufacturer here: [3]

Based on the evidence, Wiley is not a quality source of scientific publishing data, and its published studies should be scrutinized for the elements of unprofessionalism, such as corrupt funding, present in its content, that make it clear that actual scientific results are not strived for. 2 out of 5.

[1]Google "Does industry funding equal conflict of interest? Often it does, Yale authors claim" (TrustPilot mistakenly refuses to allow direct links to necessary sources)
[2]Google "percent studies cannot be reproduced" (TrustPilot mistakenly refuses to allow direct links to necessary sources)
[3] Google "Efficacy and safety of a novel, soluble microneedle patch for the improvement of facial wrinkle, Ji Yeon Hong MD" (TrustPilot mistakenly refuses to allow direct links to necessary sources)

Bought a text book by W. W. Norton (distributed by John Wiley) which included EBook access as advertised on the book itself. However, apparently on the website T&Cs, there is a disclaimer that the access is only for 6 months. Customer service declined to see my point of view that it is unreasonable when the book offers online access to have to fact-check the claim on their website, and they closed the case advising me to purchase the EBook.

Ridiculous company. Paid 150 EUR for a bunch of journals and nothing ever got delivered. No proof of shipment has ever been provided beyond claims via email. After a while customer service started ignoring my emails.

They write books for uni people, not for dummies.
I, as a person with a degree, have found their dummy books too complicated and very confusing to follow, messy contents to understand. Definitely, not for dummies. Thank you but not
.I wasted my money by ordering their books from Amazon.
Not to my expectations, at all. I taught English before, but ,definitely, can't use their books for teaching. I will try other publishers. Thank you for understanding. Best wishes to them.

How can this company have 3 stars on Trustpilot? They consistently sell products and don't deliver them. I paid over €40 for access to a test bank and no email (that was promised) ever arrived to allow access. Then they have ignored all contact via their hard to find customer support email address. Unbelievable. I'm so angry, I've contacted the IEDR (Ireland) to get them taken off DNS as fraudsters.

Took double payment on a book, asked for refund, thrown around departments and in the end had to send an email with transaction screen shots. Doubtful I'll use a company like this again, mistake or not taking double payments then beating around the bush to refund me is unacceptable. Phone lines are also terrible.

I've published four books with Wiley in the field of engineering. I was very pleased with their professionalism and the quality of their hard cover books. The books were in the 300 page range.

Other than their royalties being on the low side I have no real complaints

Worst customer service I've experienced with any website / online service. Their ebooks are not delivered as pdf, but rather as a format that requires you to install a 3rd party software that has really bad reviews. To get a refund of a $12 ebook they have me back-and-forth between the "Customer Service" and the "Credit & Collections" department (i.e.: they don't talk between departments; instead, they expect their customers to do it on their behalf). Customer Service is so bad that it looks like it's done on purpose to have customers desist from trying to get a refund (I won't fall for that). I'm trying one email more and if that doesn't work I'll do a dispute/chargeback through my credit card company.