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It’s a new year, and all we want to do is set reading goals, rate books, track our stats, and maybe even connect with other readers to help motivate us to read widely and diversely throughout the year. Fortunately, there are so many book apps out there to help us along the way. Unfortunately, for some of the most popular options out there, a few problematic practices have come to light recently.
Let’s start with Goodreads, the most popular way to track books both online and on your phone. One of the most appealing things about Goodreads is its popularity. If you want to connect with other readers and have access to loooots of reviews and ratings, you’re going to have access to the most readers here. The interface is not the most user-friendly, though, and the company is owned by Amazon. If you’re trying to avoid supporting Amazon, you might want to look elsewhere.
On top of everything you probably already know about Goodreads, it appears as if the app is not monitoring user submissions very carefully. Author Tirthak Saha noted that Goodreads page for The Brothers Karamozov included a quote incorrectly attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel. But where did the quote come from? You can check out more about his investigation here. And then, of course, there’s The Unbearable Whiteness of the Goodreads Choice Awards.
Other book tracking apps aren’t necessarily less problematic. The book tracker/book club app Fable has been under fire lately for questionable AI practices. The app used AI to create “personalized” reader summaries, and many users took to social media with concerns about the things the app said about them. Namely, the AI was leaning into racist and bigoted content. One summary told reader Tianna Trammel, “Your journey dives deep into the heart of Black narratives and transformative tales, leaving mainstream stories gasping for air. Don’t forget to surface for the occasional white author, okay?” Fable responded on Threads, “Thanks for sharing, agreed this one is not ok. I’m passing it along to the team to resolve.”
After receiving multiple complaints from users, Christ Gallello, head of product at Fable, posted a video on Fable’s Instagram: “First of all, I just want to say that we’re deeply sorry for the harm that we’ve caused in the community, for what has been generated, and for putting out a feature that can do something like that.” Gallello went on to explain that the reader summaries use an AI model that looks at the summaries of the books users are reading and came up with a short user summary based on that information. While the team felt like they had put up enough safeguards to avoid racist/bigoted comments coming through, Gallello admits that they seemed to have underestimated the amount of work they needed to put into this new technology.
So what does Fable do now to fix its relationship with its users, especially since so many are now threatening to leave the platform (or have already left)? At first, Fable intended to put limitations on the AI and remove some of the “playfulness” from the summaries, but after more pushback from the Fable community, Gallello posted a second video explaining that Fable would remove all generative AI programs from the platform completely. Fable also created a town hall event on January 6 for users to hop on and share their ideas with the team.
Are Fable’s actions enough to keep readers using the app? Will people flee back to Goodreads? Or will StoryGraph, another reading app that also uses generative AI, end up on top? What reading apps are you using this year?
