In August I decided I needed to dump my Goodreads app in favor of something else. Don’t shoot me now, my book community, but Goodreads is clunky, glitchy, and old.
Among the book apps, I came across Fable, and was startlingly impressed by the layout, design, and user interface. Unlike Goodreads, Fable has a clean and modern look to it. Goodbye Goodreads beige, hello wondrous white—like a book you’d hold in your hands. Fable put a fairytale spin on the book community that once belonged to Goodreads.
While Goodreads has a home screen full of popular picks and friend updates, Fable shows content about books you want to read or have read. That could be comments and reviews that have gained popularity or simple posts containing fanart of a character. Fable even includes quizzes, like a Book Mood Quiz—are you in a romance mood or a mystery mood? Nobody knows except this quiz.
Fable’s home screen even includes a reading streak where you can click on the books you have read that day. If Snapchat has taught us anything, it’s that people love a streak, and this is a book lover’s dream. (I’m currently on a twenty-five day streak myself.) Goodreads doesn’t have that concept, so you can imagine my “anime wonder eyes” at the feature.
Instead of having to click on the “More” button in Goodreads, Fable users will easily find the book clubs on the bar at the bottom of the display screen. Clubs can be separated into genres if you are looking for something specific, or you can even select a single club surrounding one book if you love to ceaselessly fangirl.
An “Explore” button at the bottom of the screen will help you find your next read based on what you have read, what you want to read, and what books are most popular in the app’s book clubs. It feels like readers could scroll through the feed for hours; nothing sparks our love and attention like the talk of books.
Goodreads does feature its own version “Explore” but the outdated layout isn’t appealing. More than that, any book that I have read on Goodreads will show related books in its “Discovery” even when I have rated it low. I’m not some masochist reader who seeks out books I know I won’t like. Fable doesn’t do that. It only gives me books that I have rated high. To me, that just seems like common sense, but I guess the algorithm writers didn’t think so.
I couldn’t get over the ease of this app, and the lack of glitches. Goodreads will crash or take five minutes to reload. Sometimes I have to wait a whole day for a book I have finished reading to disappear from my “currently reading” list. On Fable, I don’t.
Even better, I didn’t have to start my “have read” and “want to read” lists from scratch. Within five minutes everything was taken from Goodreads and plopped into my Fable account, making it seamless.
So far, there hasn’t been anything to make me regret abandoning Goodreads. It is a thing of the past and I, for one, like to look to the future.
