Magibook User Reviews

Reviews Summary

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Why did they launch this?

This app has only 9 books to choose from. 😳 I assumed it would allow the upload of any pre copyright text (for instance, from Project Gutenberg), but not so. Maybe they intend to get there. In the meantime, this seems like a premature launch and waste of time.

Response from developer

Thank you for your review. We are slowly curating books to ensure quality, and have grown our library to over 65 books & more to come. We will also soon add a feature in which you will be able to request/ add books. We would love for you to give us another try and stay tuned for more updates! Early days. If you would like us to add a book of your choice please reach out!

Amazing

This app has been incredible for someone such as myself who struggles to read through a full novel.
Just finished A Tale Of Two Cities. 🙌🏻

Response from developer

Thanks for sharing your success story! Finishing "A Tale of Two Cities" is a huge achievement. We're really happy our app could help make reading easier for you. Keep going - you've got this! Magibook

This is great….

I got my 6 year old nephew reading Sherlock Holmes, he loves it

Response from developer

That's amazing to hear about your nephew! Making Sherlock Holmes accessible to young readers is exactly what we hoped for. Thanks for sharing this wonderful feedback - Magibook

The contents aren’t even good

I was painfully curious so I downloaded the app and checked it out. First, there’s only 10 entries on the app (these things are no longer books). The writing is simplified, and it’s also horrible. There are typos, poor grammar, and most sentences are incomplete because they lack the basic building blocks of a sentence.

To call this an educational tool is disgusting. This is nothing but thievery and laziness. To twist the original authors words so much and claim it as educational is abhorrent.

This app should never be on the App Store. The fact that Apple allows slop like this is pathetic and embarrassing
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Unlearn your ableism before getting this app

Seriously, SO MANY of the posts on social media and these two reviews are based on the premise that this app is “dumbing down” literature. First off, READ the text in the first preview image. For folks who claim to be so “educated”, it’s very evident that you’re viewing this app through a reactionary lens of moral outrage that’s really just ableism masquerading as some twisted sense of undeserved “superiority”. It is very evident that this isn’t for the average person who can read the classics and learned to analyze them, it is meant for people, including educators and the intellectually disabled. This is clear from the start. This is NOT about the “idiocracy” (God help you all who use the same exact movie reference to denigrate anything that you don’t like) this is about ACCESSIBILITY. Accessibility is literally what disabled people lack on a regular basis and those who are intellectually disabled deserve opportunities to learn. Given how new this service is, this is actually a necessary use case to accommodate intellectually disabled and neurodivergent people, as well as those who suffer from functional illiteracy.

My main criticism of this app is in the AI implementation. But note that, at the moment that I’m writing this review, it is a free app and I’m hoping that the AI implementation can be a bit better as, currently, the syntax seems to be the main issue. There are times when subsequent sentences don’t really match in terms of context. I think that using more complex large language models for better and more appropriate diction could improve this and, given the cost and potential value, I would see this as a potentially valuable paid service. I would also suggest the author to collect expert opinions from literary scholars, disability advocates, and childhood education specialists who can confirm this app’s value. If such reviews already exist, I would suggest to the author that they add this information to their website and their App Store description.
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Response from developer

Thank you for your review and understanding of our app's mission. The App is currently in it's very early stages of development. We have major updates coming soon including the addition of more book titles, much more features and improved accuracy. We hope you will stick around for the journey !

Lots of potential!

I can’t wait to see this updated with more books, especially some more technical or non-fiction works.

Response from developer

Thank you for your kind review! Your feedback keeps us going! We have expanded our library drastically since you left this review, and we have more to come! We will make sure to include some non-fiction works in our next batch :). All the best, Magibook.

Doesn’t feel right to use it

The intentions feel noble but the use of AI to simplify great American classics feels disingenuous.

Wanting to learn a new language or having issues reading or learning is great but it ruins a lot of what makes the originals great.

Read more and read deeply, you will discover worlds that you can’t imagine before hand, but here isn’t the right place to do it
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I thought it was fake but…

It was real. I was an English teacher working abroad in Korea, China and Thailand and I can say confidently that this isn’t a learning tool, it’s the defacing of literary work. Reading education should not require the alteration of the authors words, there are already thousands of books at every reading level that English learners can use to build up to this level of reading. This is close to the old issue with CliffsNotes, it’ll help you pass a test or book report, but you won’t know what you read, you just get these simplified ideas. The Mona Lisa if it was painted in only five strokes. The fact this is done by AI makes it worse, too. It means there developer just put a shell up, ran a few chatGPT rewrites that took ten seconds each, and slapped it on the App Store, hoping to eventually convince some dum dum publishing house to let them put books that aren’t in the public domain on it and scam a living for themselves.
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