5 March 2026 · Book Assembly Team · 2 min read
You know how many books you read last year. Maybe you know the page count too. But do you know when those books were written?
It's a question most readers never think to ask. But the answer reveals something about how you read.
Some readers chase new releases. They want to be part of the conversation, read what everyone's talking about, stay current. Their shelves are full of books published in the last five years.
Other readers dig into backlists. They're working through an author's entire catalogue, catching up on classics they missed, or deliberately avoiding the hype cycle. Their shelves stretch back decades.
Most of us are somewhere in between - but where exactly?
Without seeing the data, you might not realise you went through a classics phase in 2024. Or that you've barely touched anything published before 2010. Or that last year you read almost exclusively books from the 1990s (that Discworld binge, probably).
These patterns aren't good or bad. They're just interesting. And once you see them, you might decide to change things up - or lean in harder.
We've added a publication era chart to the stats page. It shows which decades your books come from, with a few useful extras:
Breakdown by decade - see at a glance whether you skew recent or reach back further. Bars are proportional so you can spot your dominant era immediately.
Click to explore - tap any decade to see the actual books. Sometimes the data surprises you - that pre-1950 bar might be three Agatha Christies you'd forgotten about.
Filter by year read - this is where it gets interesting. Instead of all-time stats, filter to a specific year. Did your reading habits shift? Were you more adventurous in 2023 than 2025?
Summary stats - average publication year, your oldest and newest books, and what percentage come from the last 20 years.
If you've used Goodreads stats, you might have seen their publication year chart. It's a scatter plot where dots pile on top of each other, you can't click anything, and there's no way to filter by when you read the books.
We took a different approach. Clear bars, actual interactivity, useful summaries. The kind of thing you can glance at and immediately understand.
If you've got publication years on your books, the chart's already waiting on your stats page. If you don't, they're pulled in automatically when you add books - or you can add them manually to older entries.
Either way, you might learn something about yourself.
Publication years are included automatically when you add books via ISBN or barcode scan. For manually added books, you can set the year in the book details.
