Everand, the online e-book and audiobook subscription service subsidiary of Scribd, has acquired Fable, the social reading and book club app. All Fable employees will join Scribd, with Tony Grimminck, CEO of Scribd, taking over as Fable CEO, and Fable’s founder, Padmasree Warrior, set to transition to an advisory role.
Fable has three million users and hosts more than 100,000 book clubs on its app. Some of the biggest names hosting clubs include BookTok influencers Ayman Chaudhary, who runs the Spicy Romance Book Club, which has 46,500 members; PBS’s resident librarian, Michal Threets, whose Michal Threets Book Club has 10,700 members; and Kierra Lewis, who went viral in 2024 for reading the Harry Potter series and whose club, the Cousin Harry Book Club, has 6,500 members. Celebrities who have also hosted clubs, including LeVar Burton and Sean Astin.
The company also has a proprietary online bookstore, which donates 20% of net proceeds to the World Literacy Foundation, and also offers book club hosting for businesses and schools. It has free-to-use and premium priced tiers.
When Warrior launched Fable in 2021, she was a well-regarded Silicon Valley entrepreneur and was able to attract an initial seed round of $7.25 million (and later added a further $20 million in investment). "From the beginning, Fable has been guided by a simple but powerful mission: to bring people closer together with meaningful connections through the joy of stories," Warrior said in a press release announcing the sale of Fable. "We've built something special as a small independent company competing in a space dominated by tech giants, and our community is at the heart of everything we do.”
Fable has not been afraid to experiment. It began offering book clubs and curated reading lists by established authors, including Elif Batuman and David Sedaris, added reading analytics and goal-setting features, and built out social-media-like list-building and personalized book recommendations. The company also became an early example about how tech can misfire, when an AI-powered end-of-year reading summary feature generated offensive and racially insensitive content for users, an issue that the company addressed by issuing apologies, removing the AI featur,e and hosting a community forum to address the issue.
Everand and Fable will maintain their discrete business models and operate independently for the time being, though the companies said that collaborations are likely, particularly where there are synergies, such as in book discovery and community building. The companies also said that longer-term collaboration on discovery models, particularly around community-powered recommendations, may occur.
With the acquisition, Fable becomes the fourth company owned by Scribd, Inc. alongside Everand, Scribd, and SlideShare.
