Magibook: Learn to Read Books

Thank you for your contribution to the erasure (that means getting rid of) of literature (books), and in increasing (making more) of illiteracy (people who can’t read) in America! As we all know illiteracy has been increasing sharply in recent years, and your app is a fantastic contribution to helping ensure that these numbers only keep rising. In addition to the hard work you have done to help increase illiteracy, you are also doing so much to erase literature. By “dumbing down” great works, you remove so many layers of meaning from the texts as to render them almost completely different books. For example, in Moby Dick, the last sentence of paragraph one states that everyone harbors a desire to go sailing, if they only knew. However, in your wonderfully reduced version, you remove that pesky viewpoint, and just say that many others feel similarly. I really appreciate all this hard work you are doing, with any luck we can eradicate all human writers in the next 10 years! In honor of your accomplishments, I award you one star.

As someone with dyslexia, I've always struggled to get through books. Had a growing collection of titles I wanted to read but never could focus long enough to finish. Magibook has made a real difference with its bionic font option. The way it highlights parts of each word helps my brain process text without getting lost or jumbled every few lines. Still have to take breaks, but I can actually read for about 25 minutes now instead of giving up after a page or two. The interface is simple enough not to be distracting, which I appreciate. Would really love to see an audiobook feature added someday (already sent in a feature request) for those days when my eyes are too tired.

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.