Recap:
I’m ditching Goodreads for reasons, so I tried a dozen other reading trackers, and ultimately, I found five fantastic alternatives to Goodreads.
Today, we’re talking about Fable!
Fable
You might be soulmates if:
💚 You’d like to start or join an online book club.
💚 You’re ready to build a habit of reading.
💚 You want to track TV shows, too.
💚 Personality tests are your jam.
Green Flags
Fable emphasizes social connections around books. It’s a bit like if Bookstagram (just Bookstagram, nothing else on the ‘Gram) and Goodreads had a baby, and the baby took the best of each of them but also had some lovely features that couldn’t quite be traced to either one. You can join or create book clubs for any book, genre, theme, etc.
Longtime, perpetually dissatisfied Goodreads users will appreciate that Fable offers half and quarter star ratings, content ratings, and a Did Not Finish, or DNF shelf. (I’m aware that Goodreads recently, finally added a DNF shelf, but honestly, it took them how many years?)
Fable has a visually aesthetic interface and tracks more reading data than Goodreads, including your favorite authors and your average star ratings.
Your profile features a neat little reader summary that updates with each completed book. (It’s already changed several times since I took this screenshot).
You can create and download custom “shelfies” by choosing from a small selection of bookshelf knickknacks and any titles in the Fable database. (Alas, your shelfie doesn’t show up on your profile, but it’s fun.)
I think these shelfies could be a cute way to curate and promote books based on themes, prompts, genres, holidays, and so forth to recommend titles to other readers on social media.
Fable also analyzes your reading preferences for your reader personality type, or “BookAura.”
Fable is women-owned and responsive to adding features based on user requests. I particularly like how their Explore page highlights marginalized voices. The app also offers access to free ebooks (primarily those in the public domain) and supports literacy organizations with ebook purchases made through them. I found their customer service to be top-tier the one time I had to reach out (they responded to my email within an hour on a Saturday).
Beige Flags
Fable opens to this home screen. Their reading streak tracker is front and center, which is motivating for others, but stresses me out. Reading streaks: Some people love them, but I love to hate them. I loathe reading streak trackers because of how beholden I feel to them. I wish I could disable or at least hide Fable’s streak tracker.
The main page is a feed of posts from other users, a mix of friends and randos, with reviews of books that you’re reading, you’ve recently read, or you want to read. (Fortunately, spoilers are usually hidden, as you can see.) You’ll also see some posts with bookish images (e.g. ah, look at my cozy reading spot today!), discussion prompts (e.g. do you annotate your books?), etc. It feels a bit like a Bookstagram scroll.
Fable allows you to track shows like you track books. I already watch too many shows and absolutely do not need motivation to watch more TV, so I deliberately ignored this feature. Others will love it!
Eight books were lost in my initial import (out of 1500+), but they may have been duplicates anyway (past issues with Goodreads giveaways duplicating titles in my library) and Fable may have improved the accuracy of their imports over the past year. Also, some titles I’ve searched for (to add to my TBR or mark as “currently reading”) are missing, either because they’re advanced reader copies that haven’t made it into the Fable library yet or smaller press publications.
Here’s the biggest quirk in the day-to-day use of Fable that drives me crazy: It’s so clunky when marking book as finished. Depending on what screen I’m on when I do it, it doesn’t always ask for rating/review, so I have to go find that option elsewhere. It’s annoying. In general, navigation could be streamlined and more user-friendly in some places.
Okay and finally, when I hit 365 days for my reading streak, all I got for my misery was this little pop-up. No confetti. No fanfare. No prizes. No badge. Nothing.
The fact that this reading streak had a grip on me for a solid year and all I got was THIS? Rude. There are not NEARLY enough exclamation marks here.
If you’re not going to give me a pizza or something for this, at least give me the option to disable or hide the reading streaks. I BEG YOU.
Red Flag
Let’s address the elephant in the room: Fable’s AI scandal. At the end of 2024, Fable rolled out a new year-end reading summary for users that relied on AI to roast their reading habits. Unfortunately, because AI is a cesspool of bias, some of the summaries were incredibly bigoted. I won’t quote them here and stain my blog with that, but you can find them all over the internet if you need to see them for yourself.
When the company learned of this, they removed the summary option immediately, publicly owned their mistake and apologized. My understanding is that they revamped the entire feature to instead use summaries written by their human team.
It shouldn’t have happened in the first place, but I can appreciate that they owned their mistake and that they were responsive to their users. That said, until very recently, they also had a feature called Ask Scout that was AI-powered, and I don’t know why it took them so long to remove it, considering the previous debacle.
As a quick aside, even disregarding AI’s potential for bias and bigotry and straight-up hallucinations, anyone who is pro-literature and human creativity should be concerned about generative AI. Generative AI uses the works of creatives (e.g. writers, musicians, artists) to train their models without consent, acknowledgment, or compensation to those creatives. It’s a blatant copyright violation. Additionally, “creative” work generated by AI is an affront on creativity, one of the very things that makes humanity special.
This issue could fill entire books, so I’ll move on, but reading tracker apps should not be using generative AI, full stop. I’m cautiously optimistic that Fable is learning this and moving in a better direction.
Is Fable the One?
Students encouraged me to try Fable last spring, so I’ve been using it for about a year now. Out of these five apps, I have the most experience with it and I’ve enjoyed it for the most part. Even with the AI mess from last year, I think it’s still a better option than Goodreads overall.
While I like Fable, I’m planning to delete it right after I hit “Publish” on this post before I move on to…oops, I almost spoiled the happy ending!
I think Fable is the perfect reading tracker for social butterflies, binge watchers, and book clubbers.
Join me tomorrow to unpack another of the five reading trackers I recommend over Goodreads: Hardcover.
Disclaimer: I was not compensated by anyone for my opinions, nor am I affiliated with any of these reading trackers except as another reader/user. Information in this post is true to the best of my knowledge at the time of posting. If I have incorrect information, whether due to human error or an app update, please feel free to correct me in the comments!
paige in the library 