Our goal is a billion words read by a million children. That’s a real number, so we count it honestly — from two sources, updated every night. Nothing here is inflated, and anything we estimate is clearly labelled.
Books we’ve delivered
Every personalised book we deliver counts its words. Where we’ve recorded a title’s exact length we use that; where we haven’t yet, we use a deliberately conservative estimate of about 500 words for that book — a modest stand-in, clearly disclosed, that only ever counts books that have shipped.
Reading in the YATS Library
When children read chapters in the free YATS Library, those words are counted from real reading activity — measured, not modelled. We only ever keep the running total: never who read what, and never anything that identifies a child.
The rules we hold ourselves to
- Updated every night from a fresh snapshot; between updates the page shows the last verified figure.
- It only ever goes up — we never publish a number lower than the last one we verified.
- Aggregate-only, always — every breakdown by world or country is a total, never a person, and we never show a group smaller than ten orders.
- Estimates are labelled — where a book’s exact length isn’t recorded yet, the ~500-word estimate is disclosed here, not hidden inside the headline number.