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The Billion Word Challenge

How we count the words

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, and we show exactly how it’s worked out. Nothing here is inflated, and anything we estimate is clearly labelled.

Books we’ve delivered

Every personalised book we actually 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. It’s a modest stand-in, not a guess in our favour, and it 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

Honest by design.

  • Updated every night

    The total is recomputed from a fresh snapshot daily. 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, the counter can only climb.

  • Aggregate-only, always

    Every breakdown by world or country is a total, never a person. We never show a group smaller than ten orders, and never store individual reading.

  • 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.

Watch it climb in real time.

See the live counter