Magibook - Simplified Books

as someone that read voraciously as a kid, digging into really meaty and complex books with a tired mind has never worked for me. being able to toggle away from typically dense and outdated readings to something more digestible has been a major gamechanger for me. use the app daily now!

This is an excellent reading tool, powered by AI. Choose the original text in all its glory, or chose various levels of simplification, to assist with comprehension and speedier reading. What an awesome concept! Ignore the haters, this is how books will be read in the future. This is an early release, so there is a lot of room for improvement. The potential is huge. Keep up the great work, and keep developing the app!

My wife is French and knows a good amount of English, but language learning apps just aren’t good enough past a certain point. This allows her to read books in English and learn though immersion while enjoying classic stories. I recommend to any one trying to improve there English comprehension!

I never leave reviews, but this app intrigued me and has surpassed expectations. I am someone who struggles to read. Trying to comprehend what I’m reading is distracting, and I end up losing track and giving up. I haven’t read a book since I was in elementary school for this reason. It was always a struggle for me. I never even thought to attempt the classics…knowing how clever the wording was. This app has made it simple enough where I can pay attention and still be able to say I read the book. It gives me an opportunity I didn’t previously have. So many people are hating, but that’s because they don’t see the bigger picture. EVERYONE deserves a chance to read whatever book they like. And this app is the key to unlocking that possibility. The only reason I gave it 4 stars is because there is a limited amount of options. Ideally I’d like to see thousands of books, not just classics. All genres, all age groups, big and small authors. This app has so much potential and I am excited to see it blow up. You should seriously go on shark tank and get some huge backing to make a software like never before. I’d invest in it.

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.

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

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.

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.