20 October 2026 · Book Assembly Team · 4 min read
Not every update is a big new feature. A lot of the work over the last few months has gone into making things more reliable, more private and more accurate, and most of it you'd only notice if it had gone wrong. So here's a round-up, starting with the bit that matters most.
Book Assembly is free, and the site now says so plainly. Earlier pages talked about being "free while in beta" and hinted at a paid tier. There was never going to be a charge, and leaving that wording up suggested one was on its way. It's gone.
While we were at it, the signed-out home page now has the same header links as the rest of the site (Discover, Features, Blog, Support), so you can have a proper look around before signing up.
If you upload a photo of your own copy of a book, it now stays in your library. Until now it could also be used as the cover on that book's community page, even if your book and your profile were private. That shouldn't have happened.
Community pages now only use covers from the book catalogues we work with (ISBNdb and Open Library) or ones chosen by us. Your photo still shows on your own book, and on your public profile if you've chosen to share that book there. A few community pages show a plain cover as a result, until a catalogue cover turns up for them.
For readers outside the UK and Europe, dates could go a little wrong:
Reading dates moving by a day. Opening "Edit dates" on a book could show the day before the one you'd set, and saving made the shift stick. Dates now use your device's own calendar day everywhere.
The reading heatmap. Days could sit in the wrong weekday column, with the wrong month or year label on a column.
Streaks and goals. Streaks could be cut short, and a book finished on 1 January could count towards the previous year, for readers in time zones behind UTC.
All three are fixed, wherever you are in the world.
The This Year figure on your home page now counts every book you've finished this year, including re-reads, so it matches your reading goal. Before, a re-read counted towards the goal but not towards the figure. It also counts finished books whose finish date didn't make it across from an import, and no longer counts a book whose finish date was mistyped into next year. Public profiles follow the same rule, so the number beside someone's goal ring matches the ring itself.
Imported lists that looked empty. Lists made from your shelves when you imported from Goodreads, StoryGraph or LibraryThing could look empty when you opened them, even though the books were in them. Every imported list now shows all its books.
Covers for imported books. Books added by importing could take up to a week to show a cover on their community page. They now appear as soon as the import finds them.
Old backups. Choosing a backup file to import could say "unrecognised backup format" for any backup made since last year. Every backup the app has ever produced can be imported again. Your backup now also records which optional emails you've said yes to, so it shows everything we hold about you, but restoring one never changes those choices. Whatever you've set today always wins.
Duplicates joined up. Around 550 books had ended up with two entries each in the community catalogue, usually because a copy was added without quite enough information to recognise it. Their ratings, reviews and reader counts were split between two pages. They're now single pages, and any old link takes you to the right one. Another sixteen followed in September, among them all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings and Slaughterhouse-Five, whose three readers had been split across two entries.
Covers and descriptions filling in properly. We were asking our book data provider for information faster than it allows, and roughly three-quarters of those requests were being turned away. The background jobs that fill in covers, descriptions, genres and author details also weren't finishing everything they started, and treated a passing outage at Open Library as "nothing found". All of that is fixed, so books without a cover or description should get one much sooner.
Recently Added means recent. The Recently Added row on Discover was quietly showing the most widely shared books instead, so new arrivals never reached it. It now lists books in the order they joined.
Cover to Cover sharing on phones. The share button on Cover to Cover cards could do nothing at all on a phone. The picture is now prepared before you tap, and if a share is refused for any other reason the image saves to your device instead.
A new logo. The name beside the books icon is now set in plainer, closer-spaced lettering, so it reads more like a mark and less like a line of text. The icon itself hasn't changed. You'll see it in the header and footer, the emails we send, and the pictures you share from Cover to Cover.
