Book Notification Newsletter

Hi everyone. Welcome to the December 2025 Recap, and welcome to 2026! January 1st marks Book Notification’s third anniversary! [Read Online]

This month, our development team focused on two big internal projects, and one project focused towards new users.

One project we worked on is our own ticketing system, which will help us provide faster, more efficient service.

The other is an improvement to our current system for upcoming books that suddenly disappear from pre-order. While our system for detecting these books is very reliable, we had to work out a few things in relation to upcoming books which are marked “Want To Read” by users.

What if a book is on your TBR list and gets canceled, then 5 years later is eventually published? We wanted to set up a process so that if that happens, it would retain that status in your library, while not cluttering our backend for the next five years. We’ve laid the groundwork for all of that, and should be implementing it all in January.

The other big project we worked on is a much-improved system for users wanting to import their existing libraries from sites other than Goodreads. Our Goodreads system worked great, but the non-Goodreads import system required a lot of manual work.

That system worked fine when non-Goodreads imports came in sparingly, but over the last 6 months we have seen a large increase in imports from sites such as Calibre, LibraryThing, and The StoryGraph. It’s exciting seeing this influx of new users from other sites, but it was increasing our workload greatly, so we made this our priority for December.

We’re very excited about our new system as it should be able to handle exports from most, if not all websites, while also accommodating users who track things in their own custom spreadsheet. If you’re one of the users waiting for this – it should be live next week and we’ll reach out to you to let you know your import is beginning.

Our database team was also hard at work as usual this month. We now have over 95,000 authors audited and listed on the site, and that number is increasing every day. I make sure to mention this every month, because it’s the core of the site, and auditing and adding authors is hard, but important, work.

I just want to say a quick thank you to everyone who signed up at Book Notification not just over the last year, but since the site officially launched on January 1st, 2023. It’s incredible looking at where the site was back then, and where it is now. And so much of that is due to you. Your requests, your suggestions, your feedback – our goal is to create the ultimate reader’s paradise for every reader out there, and you help shape that.

And a special thank you to everyone who joined the Page Turners Club, which we launched in April and provides users with an ad-free experience. Book Notification doesn’t just rely on hard work; there are significant operational costs as well, and your support via the Page Turners Club is extremely helpful, both financially, and for our own motivation. If you aren’t a member yet, click here to join.

With that, let’s have a look back at the past year, and a preview of what we aim launch in 2026!

Until the next chapter,

Graeme
Book Notification Founder

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Here’s a look at some of the new features added to Book Notification over the last 12 months:

Audited Authors: We increased the number of authors we have audited and listed on Book Notification this year from 63,139 to 95,044, an increase of about 50%. We added 87,000 new series, and over 330,000 new books. Hats off to the database team, who do incredible work.

Adaptation News: The ability to get notified of new movie/TV adaptations based on authors that you follow. This was a passion project of ours; while it wasn’t a requested feature, it has quickly become one of the most popular features on the site.

Public Book Release Calendar: We launched this upcoming book release calendar for the general public, as well as significantly enhanced your personalized calendar, including the ability to export new book releases to Google Calendar and Apple Calendar.

Reader’s Roulette: Our first foray into helping you discover new books, authors, and series to read. We also launched Weekly Picks later in the year.

Podcasts: We launched two new podcasts this year; a weekly new book releases podcast, and the I Care About Books Book Club podcast.

Select All Feature: One of the highly requested features of Book Notification arrived in early 2025.

Customizable Printing: A very thorough, advanced printing section to allow users to customize any author’s book lists they wish to print. We also added the ability to export/print any of your library data you have on Book Notification.

Series Follow: The option to follow a series instead of an author, and only get notified of new books in that series. We won’t lie; James Patterson’s follow count took a BIG hit after launching that new feature!

Celebrity & Popular Book Clubs: We launched the best and most comprehensive book club listing online, with the additional feature of getting notified of new book club picks in the Tuesday email.

Book / Author Quotes: A new area of the site which provides easily shareable book and author quotes for a variety of events, seasons and moments. We love seeing these shared on social media and can’t wait to add more in 2026!

Those are just some of the many features and enhancements we added in the past year. You can reacquaint yourself with all our site features with the user guide, also created this year! Now let’s look at what is in store in 2026:

Mobile App: Don’t worry – we hear you. An app is the most requested feature on our list, and this is planned for 2026 (and already in the works).

“Tuesday” Newsletter Customization: Another highly requested feature is new additions to the Tuesday email; the ability to display book tags, hide books marked “Not Interested”, and highlight upcoming books you’ve marked “Want To Read”. All of this and more is planned for this year to make the weekly email truly your own.

Book Pages: We plan on launching individual book pages in 2026, providing comprehensive details about each book including synopsis, reviews, statistics, awards and more.

Statistics: If you are a fan of statistics and graphs then don’t worry – we plan on expanding our focus on statistics in 2026. Public statistics such as most followed authors per month, most-rated books, etc., as well as personalized graphs and charts based on your own reading data.

Book Giveaways: We currently do a monthly exclusive contest for the Page Turners Club featuring highly regarded and popular books; however, we are hoping to work with upcoming and new authors to give away copies of their books to all members of Book Notification.

Custom Dashboard: We want you to be able to make the Book Notification homepage your own! You will be able to customize it to suit your needs, displaying only the tools, features and links that matter to you. And if you’re old enough to remember the My Yahoo! era, we’ll have several features inspired by that level of personalization.

And that’s not all. Those are just the headline items.

As always, if you have any suggestions or feedback to enhance your experience, big or small, don’t hesitate to contact us.

For example, we had someone yesterday pointing out that the “0” didn’t delete automatically in the audiobook lengths or page count fields for books, when they want to log that. A minor annoyance, But little things like that we love to hear as we love making little fixes like that which improve the user experience.

In addition to adding author’s, we post a lot of book news and book-related content to Book Notification each month. Here are the highlights since the last newsletter:

• Popular Book Releases: January 2026
• Our Favourite Debut Books for January 2026
• January 2026 Book Club Picks
• January 2026 Book to Movie/TV Adaptations
• 5 Books on Why Social Media Is the Way It Is
• 5 Hilarious Books Written by Totally Fake People
• 5 Timeless Children’s Christmas Books for Family Reading
• 5 Classic Christmas Novels to Read This Holiday Season
• Sophie Kinsella, Beloved Author of the “Shopaholic” Series, Dies at 55
• Joanna Trollope, Bestselling Author of Family Dramas, Dies at 82
• John Varley, Science Fiction Visionary, Has Passed Away
• The Readers Have Spoken: 2025 Goodreads Choice Award Winners!
• I Care About Books Episode 6: Still Life
• Weekly Picks: Weeks 26-29
• Quotes: Morning Quotes, New Years Quotes, Winter Quotes.

Last month, we held a contest asking you what details you would like to see in regard to past adaptations of books by authors. Thank you to everyone who entered.

Here are the winners this month – all have been emailed:

1. amb
2. Larry B
3. OlaDaniel
4. Phil Ammar
5. ravinreadr
6. Rich S.
7. shadow
8. shadowchb
9. Valsmom1
10. Wessel

Quality content and discussion are always beneficial for our website. This month, we are running the comments contest – asking you to write a comment on an author’s page. It can be whatever you want. You can write about how they are your favourite author, what their best book or series is, or about an adaptation of their book. Any and all comments are welcome.

We will give away ten $25 USD gift cards to random people who have submitted a comment from the day this newsletter was published, up until the beginning of the next newsletter. Each comment earns you an entry (or ‘ticket’) into the draw, and you can enter and win multiple times so comment as often as you’d like!

We will randomly select ten winners to receive a $25 USD gift card. Entries are open from now until the publication of the next newsletter.

Members of the Page Turners Club will get an additional entry into the contest.

The comment form is at the bottom of every author’s page, under the title “Author Discussion”.

Thanks to everyone for your support. It’s genuinely appreciated.