Join a Book Club
Now I’m on to my main attraction: the book clubs. I have the option to join a book club or create my own. The “Fable Featured Clubs” on the home screen are moderated by authors like Mary Kay Andrews, actors like Sean Astin, and BookTok stars like @chamberofsecretsbooks. The book clubs are either free or premium, with many of the celebrity ones (LeVar!) locked behind a paywall. Beyond the home screen, you can “Find clubs” and filter by genre, premium status, and free ebooks, while sorting by trending number of members or last activity. The most popular clubs like the “Romance and Coffee Book Club” have between 3,000 and 6,000 readers.
I decide to join “Chamber of Classic Books,” moderated by BookTokker Cameron Capello, because the club is free and offers the free ebook of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. The club has 307 readers and about a dozen posts, organized by section. It’s here that I discover one of the coolest features in the app — and I do mean discover like some buried treasure because there is no tutorial or anything to point me to it. When I download Persuasion for the app, I can choose to read with the book club, which means I can see other members’ highlights and responses to the discussion questions that pop up in a corner with a “Let’s discuss,” tab. If you don’t mind reading a book on your phone or tablet, it’s definitely a more social way to read. If this feature is available on all the book club books (including ones you have to buy), that is a cool selling point. But as I mentioned, the “social reading” experience, which I think should be a key selling point, isn’t demoed or explained on the site.
While I was disappointed that so many of the book clubs are premium, there are some free ones that look really interesting. For example, the “Authors Guild Banned Books Club” is moderated by the author of the banned book. At the time of writing this article, Fable has Jacqueline Woodson moderating discussion of her novel Red at the Bone. While the topic and author are amazing, the club seems to have the same low participation as many of the clubs I browsed. Despite having 2k members, there are only 20 comments in the “Kickoff” section. From perusing the app, this seems to be the average level of engagement, even for clubs with thousands of members.
I was also left wondering whether the ebook of Red at the Bone came with a discussion guide. Maybe! I couldn’t tell. And while, it probably is very cool to have the read along experience with Woodson, the app is not selling it very well, and there doesn’t seem to be much engagement amongst members.
