Listen, if you're not going to take an active part in doing the right thing, no one needs to hear your opinion. Does that sounds harsh? Good. You're annoying. And you're embarrassing yourself and the rest of us.

If you've been out of the loop for the past week, book club company FABLE came under fire for racist and ableist AI generated yearly reading wrap ups, racist AI generated shelfies and offering an insufficient apology about removing the "playful" AI and offering a toggle off feature, if users weren't interested in perhaps experiencing this playful racism.

This left many influencers ready to walk away from the app, saying so both privately and publicly. And this is no small thing. I firmly believe that because the outcry was loud and plentiful, AND included people with large platforms, several who were not directly impacted/harmed, but chose to use their platform size for all the right reasons, change was made. How great that change will be remains to be seen, but as of late afternoon yesterday, Fable released a statement that the app would be updating to remove the generated ai shelfies and wrap-ups.

We've seen over the last year how important unity is in the book community and how much we can achieve when we work together to make change. Many of you here in the Boozhoo Books community understand that, as we have seen how necessary it is to fight for room for diverse voices in publishing. This is not unrelated (and a much larger conversation).

People who shout "cancel culture" from the sidelines, or don't want to be inconvienenced because they like the features, or the harm didn't impact them directly, benefit from the status quo. They will hate when we get loud. And we will continue to get loud because that's how you get things done. They don't understand this because they've never had to stand for anything.

I will be attending Fable's Town Hall meeting on Monday evening to hear what they've done and what their plan is moving forward. I will also be having a 1:1 with them next week to provide some feedback on my experience. My hope is that Fable will learn from this experience, but also take action to make sure diverse bookclubs, diverse stories and diverse voices are prioritized.

At present, I have not deleted my Fable bookclubs ( a lot is dependent on these meetings), but I will be keeping Discord as an option for people who are not ready to put their trust back into the app just yet. Additionally, I see our Boozhoo Books Discord server as an extension of this community and a great way for us to communicate more directly about recent events like this, publishing news, and go into more depth about our favorite topic (Books, duh!) You can join the Discord here: https://discord.gg/S6vwHnjfZh

I'd like to thank all of you once again for being here and thank you for using your voices when the situation calls for it. I am consistently reminded of how powerful we are.

Let me know your thoughts about using Fable moving forward below.

*If you are just finding Boozhoo Books, please consider joining the community. It's free and takes a few seconds to do. You just need an email address.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​