Big news: you can now purchase (some) books in the app
Jun 5 2023
Readers around the country are struggling to find “Fourth Wing” right now, but today, you can read it instantly, right inside the Fable app.To support Fable’s community of passionate readers, we’re happy to offer something all readers want: books. We came up with a pretty cool way to integrate ebooks directly into the club experience, so that readers can dive deep into a book and discuss it with others on the sentence level and in real-time. We’re proud of our catalog of over a million ebooks that can be read this way, which is growing all the time. But if you primarily use the Fable app on iOS, you might have noticed that the buying experience for ebooks is… not ideal. For the last several months, not only could you not purchase books in the app, but we couldn’t direct you to where you CAN purchase books: in our webstore. There are several reasons for this—and if you use apps like Spotify for audiobooks, you may be familiar with this type of opaque messaging—but we don’t want to get into the details of Apple’s draconian “anti-steering” rules or the profit margins on ebooks. Suffice it to say, buying ebooks on Fable has historically been a pretty tricky thing to do.
We’ve been working for months on ways to make that experience less painful. Today we’re excited to announce one of the most significant steps we’ve taken yet: we’ve made almost a hundred books available to purchase in the app. No more vague messaging, no more redirecting to the webstore: for these hundred titles, if you decide you want to read one, you can do so in just a couple of clicks.
You can find all the available titles in this list. We hope you find something you’ve been wanting to read, and take this opportunity to try out Fable’s interactive reader with your community.
Now, to answer some questions you might have about this update:
What about the rest of the books in Fable’s catalog?
They aren’t going anywhere! You can still buy any book available on Fable in our webstore, at fable.co/store. When you buy an ebook on the web, it’s automatically added to your bookshelf in the app for easy reading.How did you pick the hundred books?
We looked at several different factors, including what books some of our clubs would be reading, books that have historically been popular on Fable, big new releases, and books that often get clicked in the app. We’d say the resulting list is a bit more art than science, though science helped.Why are you only making a hundred books available for in-app purchase?
There are several reasons, most of which are pretty boring. Suffice it to say, if we see a lot of interest in in-app purchasing for these titles, we’ll look at making more books available.I want to read X. Can you add it to the list of in-app purchasable books?
Send us a note at support@fable.co and we’ll see what we can do! If you don’t want to wait, you can always browse and buy any book in our catalog at fable.co/store.How long will these books be available to purchase in the app?
It really depends on how much interest we see from our community. If people are enjoying it, then indefinitely!How often will the books switch?
We aren’t currently planning to swap out new books for the existing ones, but we’ll periodically add books to this list as new books become available or we notice a spike of interest in a title. That’s it for now. Check out the list, and as always, let us know if you have questions at support@fable.co. We hope this update makes it a little easier to find, read, and discuss books on Fable. Happy reading!