Apple Books just got a Spotify Wrapped-style recap for readers – and it beats Apple Music Replay

An iPhone on an orange background showing the Apple Books app
(Image credit: Apple)

Apple has just launched Year in Review, a Spotify Wrapped-style round-up for its Books app, where you’ll be able to see personalized stats covering all the books you read in the app over the past year. If you’re curious about who your most-read author is and how long you spent leafing through literature in 2023, you’ll want to take a look.

You’ll need to open the Books app and select the Read Now tab in the bottom-left corner, then find the 'Your Year in Review' card under the Top Picks header. Tap that and you’ll find a bunch of fascinating facts about your reading habits from the last 12 months. Note that you’ll need to have marked at least three books as completed to get your reading summary.

For example, Apple has created six ‘reader types’ that are defined by the way you read or listen to literature. These types include 'The Completionist' for readers who consume multiple books in a series, and 'The Contemporary' for people who love trending titles.

Apple has also published several lists of the most-read books across all Books users – Spare by Prince Harry took the top spot for a non-fiction title, while Only the Dead by Jack Carr was the top fiction audiobook. The company did something similar for its Podcasts app, where you can see all the top-ranked shows among listeners.

Better than Apple Music Replay

Three iPhones side-by-side showing the Apple Books Year in Review feature.

(Image credit: Apple)

Apple has put an emphasis on sharing this year, with book cover collages, graphs and statistics to send to your friends. All of this reading info is contained within Apple’s Books app, which makes it easy to catch up with your year-end review in between reading a novel or listening to an audiobook.

That makes it very different from Apple Music Replay. This is Apple Music’s take on Spotify Wrapped and, like Books’ Year in Review, gives you a deep dive into your music tastes in 2023.

The difference, though, is that Apple Music Replay is hosted on Apple’s website, not in the Apple Music app. You can still see all the same stats and figures as you’d expect, but there’s an extra degree of friction in the process. Compare that to Spotify, where its Wrapped round-up is right there at your fingertips in the app.

Why Apple built the Year in Review into its Books app but still refrains from making Apple Music Replay an app-based feature is a mystery. Regardless, head over to Apple’s Books app if you want to get the lowdown on your reading habits in 2023.

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Alex Blake
Freelance Contributor

Alex Blake has been fooling around with computers since the early 1990s, and since that time he's learned a thing or two about tech. No more than two things, though. That's all his brain can hold. As well as TechRadar, Alex writes for iMore, Digital Trends and Creative Bloq, among others. He was previously commissioning editor at MacFormat magazine. That means he mostly covers the world of Apple and its latest products, but also Windows, computer peripherals, mobile apps, and much more beyond. When not writing, you can find him hiking the English countryside and gaming on his PC.

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