HomeTar Heel Reader is one year old today!
One year ago today Karen posted the first book, Jimmy Choo Shoes, to the creaky version of this site running on my desk side computer. We had no idea the site would take off like it has!
Here is a graph showing the number of books read each week since we began (click the image for a larger version). You can see that from modest beginnings we have grown to delivering about 15,000 books in a typical week.
Over the year 424,689 books have been read in 97 countries. We now have 3,955 books in 9 languages (English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Spanish, and Swedish). Check out the map and tables showing the locations of our readers.
The most frequently read book on the site is The First Black President by Adunnola Waterman French.
It has been a great pleasure to hear from those of you who are using the site. Reports that children are enjoying reading make the investment of time and money worthwhile.
Happy Birthday Tar Heel Reader.
June 19th, 2009 at 9:35 am
I love the map of total use of the site and readings of my books specifically. Is there a link somewhere, or an automatic process, for visitors or folks with accounts to see counts of which books are getting read and how many times where?
June 19th, 2009 at 10:17 am
I have stats that I keep on how many times each book has be read. I haven’t thought of a way to usefully display times read by book and location. That is a 2D (or 3D on a map) function that is challenging to display.
The crude hack that produces those maps takes several seconds per user, thus I run it only once per week. Perhaps I can come up with a once-per week listing of how many times each book has been read.
March 3rd, 2011 at 2:16 am
would love to get a registration/invitation code to create books and share. Thanks for creating this resource!