7 August 2026 · Book Assembly Team · 4 min read
Back in January I wrote about why book series are a mess. Numbering that changes between editions, prequels published twenty years later, novellas that may or may not count. A lot of the work since Discover launched has gone into making series, and the authors behind them, easier to find your way around.
Authors now have their own pages. Every author name on a book's community page links through to one, and Discover has a Popular Authors row showing the most-read authors in the community.
An author page lists their books in the order they were first published, earliest first, which is handy for following a career from the start or reading a series in order. If you'd rather see what's most read, there's a switch for that. Each book shows its first-publication year where we know it.
Many authors now have a short biography and a photo, introducing who they are and what they've written. More are added as the details become available.
Book Assembly works out who an author is behind the scenes, so different spellings of the same name ("J.R.R. Tolkien", "Tolkien, J. R. R.") all end up on one page instead of three.
Co-written books. A book by more than one author now appears on every one of their pages, not just the first name listed. Good Omens shows up under both Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, and its page says "by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman". Translators, editors and illustrators are deliberately left out of that line: being credited on a book isn't the same as having written it.
A community book page now shows "Part of [series]" when the book belongs to one, linking straight to the series and its reading order.
If you're signed in, a series page shows how many of its books you already have. Each one you own gets a tick, and a summary under the reading order gives the total. No more standing in a bookshop trying to remember whether you've got book four.
Series pages also now:
Say whether the series is finished. A short label near the top reads Complete, Ongoing or On pause, with a line explaining what that means. Worth knowing before you start something with no ending in sight.
Show publication years, in the right order. Each book shows the year it was published, and "Publication Order" really is publication order. Before, a series could list its books in the order they happened to be added.
Offer more than one order where it matters. Lonesome Dove has a chronological order alongside the publication one, since the two run almost opposite ways round.
Seven new series arrived on Discover along the way: Aubrey-Maturin, The Adventures of Tintin, Lonesome Dove, The Passage, Regeneration, Red Rising and Thomas Cromwell. Each has its books in order with a short introduction, and the Series browse now shows cover pictures for every series.
Some authors don't stop at one series. Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere and Terry Pratchett's Discworld span several series that share a world, and working out where to start is half the battle.
These wider worlds now have their own reading order: one continuous order across the whole thing, with each book showing which series it comes from, a tick if you own it, and reading notes you can expand to read in full. Every series in one of these worlds links to the full order. Moving between a book, its series and its wider world keeps you inside Discover, with a clear trail back to where you came from.
Community book pages now include chapter summaries for many books, from OpenFiction: Discworld, the Dark Tower, His Dark Materials, the Grishaverse and more. They're useful for picking a series back up after a long gap, or checking who someone was before the next book.
They're built to avoid spoilers. The Chapter Summaries section sits near the foot of the page and starts closed. You open the section, then the chapter you want, so nothing gives itself away while you're browsing. You can hide the chapter titles too, and longer books (some run past 150 chapters) have a search to jump straight to a chapter.
A small change you'll notice everywhere. Book titles with the series stuck on the end ("Cibola Burn (The Expanse, #4)") now simply read "Cibola Burn", in your library and across Discover. That affected more than a quarter of the shared catalogue.
Nothing else about your books changed. Your ratings, reviews, reading dates, and any series you've set up yourself are exactly as you left them. It also means the same book no longer turns up twice in Discover because one person's copy had the series in the title and another's didn't. Books you import or add by searching now come in with the tidy title from the start.
