Why You Should Consider Using Fable
Why Fable might be the best website for book lovers.
Just a couple of weeks ago, the US government had planned to ban TikTok over concerns involving security due to Chinese ownership over parent company Bytedance after a recent Supreme Court case ruling in favor of a ban. The ban was supposed to start on January 19th and started taking effect the night before this due date. This ban ended up lasting only a couple hours, with TikTok once again working for Americans by the afternoon, with a message popping up claiming that Donald Trump had come up with a deal so Americans could still use the app, having issued an executive order which delays the ban for 75 days.
What exactly happened here is something I don’t think any of us will be able to figure out. What I do understand is that this proposed ban had many people devastated, especially those in industries that had largely benefitted from the app, including the publishing industry. It had been a space where readers could share their love for books and promote certain new releases, both of which have helped many books, both new and slightly older, become bestsellers in recent years. If such a space had been lost, this would have resulted in the loss of one the biggest marketing tools the publishing industry has had in years.
Luckily, we still have this space available, but I think there’s still much which those of us who love reading need to start taking into consideration as a lesson from this incident, especially since a permanent ban could still take place. Back in May, I wrote about the proposed ban and how readers and writers should start considering alternatives to BookTok in case we were no longer able to use it in the future. Perhaps we should still consider finding another space which can supplement what we get through BookTok.
Many of you are probably already aware of the reading tracking website called Goodreads. It’s a place where you can track the books you read, rate and review the books you finish, follow other users, and create a variety of bookish lists. It’s one of the most popular sites of its kind, yet a lot of people have disliked using it in recent years. Part of the reason is because the website has what’s considered a dated design and features. You’re not able to do things like give half star reviews or mark books as unfinished. Also, the website was bought out by Amazon several years, and many people consider this to have been when the decline of Goodreads began. Some readers have been taking issue with Amazon for a while now on account of how they sell books for lower prices and how they’ve been taking away business from bookstores. This has led some people to stop using websites which are affiliated with Amazon, including Goodreads.
There are now several alternatives to Goodreads. There’s The Storygraph, which has several of the features which Goodreads doesn’t, including giving quarter and half-star ratings, the ability to mark books as unfinished or paused, and several graphs showing things like your most read genres, the pace of the books you read, and even the moods of the books. However, there’s less of a social aspect to Storygraph. You can follow users and do buddy reads, but it’s not a website that’s really designed to form social connections with fellow readers, making it not the best alternative to Booktok.
Another alternative, and the one I think would be much better as a Booktok alternative, is Fable. Fable has some of the same features which Storygraph has, like half star ratings. The major difference is that the website is designed to look more like a social media website, such as Twitter or Instagram. You’re able to see certain things which other users post, including book reviews and general reading updates, based on books you’re currently reading or have shelved as wanting to read or having read before. As a result of this, it’s often much easier to get likes for any book reviews you post than it is on Goodreads. It’s also usually easier to get likes in general. Early in January, I posted a picture featuring a stack of books I own which I want to read throughout the year, and without even adding any tags that picture got 133 likes and 9 responses.
Fable also features two different calendars. One includes the titles of the books you read each day, which come up after you’ve marked off that you’ve read for the day, and the other shows how many books you read each month. Towards the end of the month, you’re able to create a graphic showing all the books you managed to finish for that month, and you can pick the font, color, and any images you want to add to it. Another graphic you can make is called a shelfie, in which you can include some of your favorite books on a shelf and adjust the background and colors as you wish.
Another thing that might be very appealing to certain readers is that Fable has many different book clubs that you can join. There are clubs dedicated to the classics, romance, thrillers, diverse reads, and so much more. I have yet to join a book club, but some that I might eventually join include The World Tour Bookclub, which focuses on reading a book from each country, and Weird Girl Book Club, which focuses on books where the stories are just as weird as the girls in them.
You can also include TV shows you’ve watched on Fable. However, this is currently limited to the ability to post about any shows you’re currently watching and mark off any shows you’ve already watched or which you couldn’t finish. However, you’re not able to include ratings for TV shows or track down when you watched certain shows the way you can with books.
Some disadvantages of Fable are that it doesn’t let you specify the format of the books you’re reading, so you can’t trick how many of your reads are though audiobooks or e-books. It also doesn’t let you sort books in different ways, such as by the date of publication, the way you’re able to on Goodreads. There were also some problems that came about due to the use of AI to label what sort of reader you were after some users brought up concerns that it was giving them racist or ableist comments. This resulted in the feature being removed from Fable. I thought this was an interesting feature when I first joined the website (I didn’t get any offensive comments), but I can understand the need to remove certain features if something goes wrong, especially if it resulted in harmful statements being made, and hopefully they can eventually come up with an alternative which anyone can feel comfortable using.
I do hope that Fable can eventually expand on certain features, include the tracking of different reading formats, the option of sorting books based on many different things, and ratings, graphics, and tracking for the TV shows users watch. I also wouldn’t mind the ability to track movies, even if we do have Letterboxd for that. And perhaps if it allowed users to include videos, the website could become a lot more like BookTok. However, because of the way it’s already run like a traditional social media website, I think that in itself could help Fable become the next major website for readers to share their love of reading with others.
Overall, Fable is now one of my favorite websites for books and I hope that by sharing more information about it, several other readers will consider giving it a try.