Blog Post

How To Annotate Books with Fable

Jason BoogJan 14 2023

Around the world, people are sharing annotated books with the people they love. The annotating books hashtag on TikTok has earned more than 75 million views. Friends have made joy-inducing videos like this one from emmabjork.eb about gifting annotated books to friends and loved ones. It’s easy to highlight and annotate books with Fable, and you can share those notes with one other person or your entire book club!

What is annotating?

Annotating books is the process of adding your own thoughts, feelings, and research to a book or ebook. In a print book, people use pens, colored pencils, highlighters, sticky notes, colored tape, and other tools to mark important passages and sections in a book.

Start by downloading the free Fable app.

Fable is a social reading platform for book clubs, specially designed for sharing books with friends. With books on Fable, you can add photos, videos, podcasts, and other links to make your annotations truly special. You’ll have a record of all your favorite passages, personalized with links you explored while reading.

How do you annotate an ebook on Fable?

Whether you are reading the book with thousands of friends or a single person, our tools make it easy to annotate any text with notes, highlights, photographs, music, videos, or other special links. Once you download the Fable app, follow these simple steps to annotate a book for a friend or loved one…

1. Create a Fable book club and add your favorite book.

Click the “Book Clubs” icon at the bottom of the Homescreen
Press “Create New Club”
Choose a name and description for your Book Club
Invite your friend or loved one to join your club
Don’t tap the “make club public” switch, keeping the club private

2. Annotate your favorite sections

You can highlight your favorite passages, and bring the book to life with links to videos and websites, or make a music playlist and share the link at the perfect moment in the book!

Tap and hold the first word of your favorite passage
Drag your finger to highlight the complete passage
Resize the highlight by moving the blue pins
Tap your completed highlight
Press the “Add Comment” button to share your thoughts about the passage
Share a link to a related article, image, podcast, video, or other content inside your comment

3. Make it personal with photographs and messages

Press the “Add Comment” button to share your thoughts about the passage
Tap the photo icon to upload your favorite photographs
Add special memories to personalize the annotations

4. Invite your friend or loved one to join your club

Click the wheel icon in the upper right-hand corner to access the “Invite Readers” screen
Share the invite through email, text messages, Slack, WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media tools
Copy the invite link to your clipboard and share it wherever you like--a completely private book-sharing experience with only two readers!

Why do people annotate books they read?

Highlights and annotations help you remember books better and quickly find your place inside text. When you share an annotated book with a friend, lover, or partner, you forge a new connection between two people. You explore this story world together, discovering new characters, places, and ideas. In this BookTube video from books with chole, you can learn more about annotating a print book.

Is it good to annotate books?

Yes! The act of reading together with another person is called social reading. There are many benefits of social reading, including:

Annotating books can help you connect even more deeply with somebody, literally sharing your thoughts and feelings as the other person reads.“My mother worried that because I was holed up in my room reading, I would become socially stunted,” writes Donalyn Miller in “The Book Whisperer.” “To the contrary, reading would connect me to the most important people in my life.” Miller loves to share books with her husband, and he turns to her for great stories to read together. Miller describes the unique role books play in her relationship:

“Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words. Neither one of us could imagine spending our life with someone who did not read.”

Love letter books for Valentine’s Day

What book do you share like a love letter with people you care about? Post a photo of a book you’ve annotated (on or off Fable) on social media, and we’ll start a gallery of great annotated books. Tag it #loveletterbooks, so we’ll see it!The Fable app is designed for social reading, making it super easy for you to share your thoughts, highlight favorite lines, take notes, and have discussions while reading together with any number of readers—from your whole book club to your best friend. Try reading a book together with a close friend, lover, or partner this Valentine’s Day!

By Jason Boog

Jason Boog is a writer living in Los Angeles and part of the editorial team at Fable. OR Books published "The Deep End: The Literary Scene During the Great Depression and Today," his book about how different writers survived the Great Depression. Simon & Schuster’s Touchstone imprint published "Born Reading: Bringing Up Bookworms in a Digital Age," his handbook about how to raise kids who love to read. His work has appeared in The Believer, The Awl, Salon, NPR Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Peace Corps Writers, and other outlets. He was the West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly.