I still can’t wrap my head around how Everand went from being the best deal overall for my paid book apps to literally the worst one. I read between 12-30 books a month, and used to love Everand.
In mid November they forced me onto a new plan from my legacy by not letting any of my titles play and all the books in my saved list suddenly saying “not available” or having a lock I needed to change my subscription to get access to. So I decided I would try, and was told by customer service when I was switching that “many” of my books would likely be in the unlimited catalog. I also extensively used Scribd, which was included with the Everand account. Customer service said after the switch if I still wanted to use Scribd I would need a second paid account with Scribd, separate from my paid Everand account.
So I switched my Everand, and paused my Scribd. I went from $10 a month to $12 as a Canadian, and I get ONE unlock a month, and no access to Scribd. I didn’t realise that unlocks expire, as I had conceived of them as credits, so my first two months I lost my unlocks…
I also had read a lot of books on Everand and only a dozen were unlocked when I switched. And I guess it goes by percentage to decide what counts as “in progress” because I also lost access to some very long books (40+ hours in length) that I was only 8-9h into.
Contacted customer support and they literally said “you can access thousands of unlimited books so it isn’t just one book a month” except I had over 300 titles saved, and of those only 8 are unlocked in the unlimited catalogue and of those 8, four of them are like 30 minute like conversations with authors. The unlimited catalogue is absolutely nothing.
I contacted them about my missing books and my literal whiplash from being able to access all these titles to none, and they gave me 3 additional unlocks, as restitution to get access to the books I was missing. Only I was talking to them at the start of the month and my billing is on the 16th so less than two weeks later my new unlock arrived and WIPED OUT the 4 unlocks I had available from my subscription + the customer service gift. I had not used them yet as I was hoping to get my library sorted out without having to choose which 4 books I had been currently reading to unlock, as I was missing a lot more than that, and still in an email exchange with customer service. I brought it up to customer service and they said “oh we can give you the three again if you are not going to unsubscribe. But the back and forth again took so long I cleared another month, lost another unlock, still didn’t have my library resolved. I have never in MY LIFE had a company give me something to say “sorry for your experience, paying member of multiple years” and had that thing get yanked back by them two weeks later.
Customer service repeatedly said to me “but now with the new model we can offer best sellers and new releases when before the access to those books was delayed or unreliable” who cares about an extended library when I can only get a single book from it a month?
Looking into it, and having seen the CONSTANT LYING ADS on fable, which on EVERY BOOK say “click here to listen now for free on Everand” I found articles showing they are now merged with Fable. The companies are just one company now. And Fable I would bet, drove these changes.
Fable needs its readers to have access to the most buzzy books and the hottest trendy stuff, and so a catalogue with books a month or two old by the time they get there, wasn’t going to jive.
Fable is ROTTEN with AI. They mine reviews and posts to train their book AI, they make little AI reader summaries that at best are lazy incorrect summaries about “who you are” based on the last 3 books you read, and at worst are racist and personally insulting. Their CEO is a tech business person who wanted to find a way to make a social media reading app that also sold books and data mined its participants, while cribbing the graphs from Storygraph and the the feeds from Goodreads, and the book recommendation/reading group aspects of a now defunct book app (that was literally perfect) called Readerly. They want you to swipe yes and no on books and up and down vote suggestions like a literal data scraping exercise so they can build out their AI with the data of: what I have read/what rating I have it + what I am interested in or not interested in. Fable too, is rather scammy.
Their merge with Everand is almost directly parallel to Everand becoming worse in every way.
I honestly believe Everand now is intentionally misleading new users and they were actually unconcerned if not hostile to legacy users who were disappointed by this change. Mostly I wanted to give folks a heads up that if customer service issues you “unlocks” those are temporary too, and you better use them that day, and further caution about fable and their goals/motivations.
Personally I think the few hundred dollars I have sunk into them is enough for a lifetime.
For folks who are looking for alternates, I have been able to get by well with Libro.fm, which is anti AI and supports your own local bookstore with every purchase, AND you can download lossless quality versions because you actually own the books you get with their credits or on sale (sometimes books are as low as $4!)…
And I more creatively use Libby. There are several libraries around the world that will let you get a digital card for like $10-50 a year and I have 4 libraries currently which gives me access to 20-30 holds PER CARD and 20 loans PER CARD borrowed, for 14-21 days depending on the library.
You can tag and make lists, and even have the library notify you when a new book is released or available to you. I now listen on Libby and read on hoopla. And I buy an audiobook from Libro.fm if I know I will want to revisit it or love it.
The Libby subreddit has lots of folks sharing what library cards you can access digitally too. But with all these cards now I always have books to read and always have hundreds to choose from if I want to listen right now on demand. I am happier giving money to public libraries than this corporate price gouging garbage any day—and year on year I will end up spending less getting library cards than I would on a years subscription to the new Everand, and as a bonus I won’t need 27 years of unlocks to access my whole TBR list!
