For years, Risingshadow has been a place to discover books, follow upcoming releases, rate what you have read, and build a personal bookshelf. Today, we are taking one of our biggest steps forward in a long time.
We are introducing Reading Insights, a new way to explore your reading history and the world of books within Risingshadow.
The idea behind Reading Insights is simple: your bookshelf can be much more than a list of books you have read.
As your reading history and ratings grow, they begin to form a picture of you as a reader. Reading Insights turns that history into something you can explore.
What does your reading history say about you?
If you have been using your Risingshadow bookshelf for years, you may already have a substantial reading history waiting for you.
Reading Insights can help you explore the kinds of books that make up your reading, the genres and areas that stand out in your bookshelf, how you tend to rate books, and how your reading has changed over time.
The goal is not simply to give you another statistics page. We want to help uncover patterns in your reading history that would be difficult to notice by looking through a long list of books.
And you do not need a perfect reading history to begin.
Your Reading Insights grow with your bookshelf.
Every book you add gives us a little more to work with, and your picture as a reader can become richer over time.
Explore more than your own reading
The new Statistics experience also opens up Risingshadow's wider library for exploration.
You can travel through more than a century of publication history, explore books from different decades, examine ratings and upcoming releases, and see how major areas of speculative fiction have developed over time.
Many of the visualizations are also interactive. If a particular year, decade, or genre catches your attention, you can continue from the statistics directly to the books behind the numbers.
Statistics are much more interesting when you can actually explore what created them.
Fantasy, science fiction, or horror?
One of the new views follows Risingshadow's three primary genres, Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror, across publication years.
Seeing them together makes it possible to explore how their presence in our library has changed over time.
When did a genre begin to grow? How have Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror developed alongside one another? And which books are behind those changes?
On the personal side, the question becomes even more interesting:
How has your own reading changed?
Reading Insights can look beyond what you enjoy today and help you explore the path that brought you there.
A major milestone for Risingshadow
Reading Insights has been a substantial project for us.
Behind the new interface is a much larger effort to make better use of the reading and book data that has accumulated on Risingshadow over many years.
We have also tried to be careful about what that data can actually tell us. Reading history is rarely perfect, and not every bookshelf contains enough information to support every kind of insight.
When there is not enough evidence for a meaningful observation, we would rather say so than invent a story from incomplete data.
That principle has been an important part of building Reading Insights.
Build your own reading world
If you already have a Risingshadow account and have been adding books to your bookshelf, take a look at what your reading history has to say.
You may already have years of reading waiting to be explored.
If your bookshelf is still small, this is a good reason to start building it. Add books you have read, rate them, and let your reading history grow over time.
And if you have not joined Risingshadow yet, you can create an account and begin building your own bookshelf.
This is only the beginning
This release marks the completion of the first major development phase of Reading Insights, but it is not the end of the project.
For now, we want to see how people actually use it.
Which insights do you find interesting? What do you discover in your reading history? Is there something that looks strange or difficult to understand? Is there something about your reading that you would like to explore but currently cannot?
Those experiences will help guide where Reading Insights goes next.
For now, we hope you will explore it, experiment with it, and perhaps discover something about your reading that you did not know before.