What's New: September 2026
September 18, 2026 · The Worldly Team
Games
Worldly now has a Games tab!
Word games aren't reading, but they use many of the same skills: breaking a word into parts, noticing what changing one letter does, holding a definition in mind while you look for the word. They're also easier to start than a book when a kid isn't in the mood. We have four word games to begin.
Plot Holes asks you for words, like a favorite animal or a silly sound. Your answers then drop into a story, and you read what you made. We have 8 stories so far, including a Dragon Owner's Manual, a Volcano Safety Briefing, and a set of Morning Announcements. They're better read out loud.
Loose Letters gives you a handful of letters and a timer. You make as many words as you can before time runs out. There's no way to lose a round.
Stitchies is a word ladder: TOP to TAP to CAP to CAT, changing one letter at a time. You get three puzzles a day at Easy, Medium, and Hard, plus an archive of past days if those go quickly.
Word Heist gives you five clues and a secret word to guess, also three puzzles a day at three difficulty levels.
We spent a while on the word lists. Most word-frequency data is drawn from adult writing, so it rates "brig" and "gout" as common and "mitten" as uncommon. We went through the lists by hand instead, so the puzzles only ask for words a child is likely to know. Any real word a kid finds still counts, of course.
Halloween
Four Halloween titles are up now.
- Not Your Stop (interactive, grades 2–6): it's Halloween morning, you're a ghost, and you're carrying twenty-four cupcakes to the class party when you get on the wrong bus. Twenty scenes, seven endings.
- Ready, Set, CHOMP! (interactive, grades 1–4): the school pumpkin has grown feet and entered a race. Five endings.
- Boo! How Halloween Began (picture book, K–3): where the holiday came from, starting with lanterns carved out of turnips.
- Flowers, Food, and Memories (picture book, K–3): an introduction to Día de los Muertos, including the marigolds, the food families cook, and the stories they tell about relatives who have died.
New in the library
Days Long Ago is a six-book history collection for younger readers. Each book covers one ordinary day in a different place: a Viking farm, a castle, the streets of Rome, ancient Egypt, race day in ancient Greece, and old Japan.
Five illustrated nonfiction readers were added to Level 3: Up, Up, Mountains!, Scales, Shells, and Tails, Tiny Bacteria, Big Jobs, All Aboard! Let's Explore Trains, and Bug-Sized Wonders. Each is twenty-one illustrated pages.
From the team
September turned into a games month, which isn't what we expected when it started. We also gave Home a proper tablet layout, so it should no longer look like a stretched phone. Everything in Worldly is still free, games included.
What's New: August 2026
August 22, 2026 · The Worldly Team
New this month: six interactive stories
Last month we launched Interactive Fiction, and this month there are more title!
Fright Night: The Wrong House is the first in a new anthology of scary-but-not-too-scary stories for grades 3–5. It's a first babysitting job at the too-perfect house at the end of Maple Court, where every clock stopped at 9:58. Can you escape before 10:00? More Fright Night titles are on the way soon.
Five more branching stories joined the library too:
- Camp Flapjacks: your first summer at the sleepaway camp famous for its pancakes. Food fights, flag raids, and the Golden Spatula cook-off. Grades 3–4, six endings.
- The Midnight Market: your cat leads you through an archway of fireflies into a market that isn't there in the daytime. Trade wisely, mind the last bell. Grades 2–5, six endings.
- One More Level: the arcade cabinet at the back of the pizza shop is showing a level that doesn't exist, and it's been holding a player since 1987. Grades 3–5, seven endings.
- The Last Arcade: dodge the Bug in the maze, grab the token, crack the code on the cave wall, reach the exit before the power cuts. Grades 3–5, four endings.
- One Marble Short: the class Marble Jar is in pieces on the floor, forty-nine marbles are under the desks, and the party needs fifty. Fifteen minutes to the bell, and the day only goes one direction. Grades 2–6, six endings.
We also added something that makes these stories smarter: your reader now carries things with them. A token picked up in scene three still opens a door in scene twenty. A decision made in the morning gets remembered at the end of the day. A password read off a cave wall works later, but only if you stopped to read it. Poking around early actually pays off now.
And for readers who'd rather have a straight line than a branch: The Odyssey, adapted from Homer across eight episodes for grades 2–5. A war ends, Odysseus turns twelve ships toward home, and ten years later he has lost every one of them. Classic.
Reading streaks
Read one section of anything and the day fills in. Read tomorrow and it fills in again. Badges arrive at three days, seven, thirty, and a hundred.
Two details we thought hard about, because streaks can turn into pressure fast. Everyone gets one save per month, which covers a missed day without losing the run. They don't stack up, so there's no hoarding. And the day rolls over at 3am rather than midnight, so a kid reading late on a Friday gets credit for Friday. Your longest streak is permanent too: it only ever grows, so a broken run never erases what came before it.
Pages, if your kid prefers pages
Our reader has always scrolled. Now it can turn pages instead, like a real book. Tap the edge of the screen or swipe. It's in the text settings menu inside the reader.
Some kids find scrolling faintly endless, especially in a long chapter. A page count gives them a finish line they can see. Worth trying if your reader tends to stall out partway through.
From the team
Six branching stories in five weeks is more than we planned on, and it's mostly because they're the most fun thing we make! Fright Night is where we're pointing next. Everything in Worldly is still free, so there's nothing standing between your kid and any of it.
What's New: July 2026
July 18, 2026 · The Worldly Team
Interactive Fiction is here
Last month we mentioned we were experimenting with choose-your-own-adventure stories. They're live now, and we've settled on a name: Interactive Fiction. Your reader makes choices that branch the story, and the path they take changes how it ends.
Two to start with:
- One Night in Hadley House: a spooky-house adventure for grades 2–4. Fifteen scenes, twenty-one choices, and five different endings depending on how brave (or careful) your reader decides to be.
- Stop the Presses!: a school-newspaper mystery, also grades 2–4. The mascot is missing, the big game is tomorrow, and you've got three hours to file the story. Twenty-seven choices, five endings, and a ticking clock.
These are great for reluctant readers. When the story only moves forward if you decide what happens next, "just one more page" turns into "just one more choice."
New in the library
Three more titles this month:
- Captain Theo's Star Map: a six-book series for our youngest readers (ages 6–7). Theo and his little robot Bolt fly their ship to a new corner of the night sky in every book: the Rings of Saturn, a comet's tail, a moon garden. Loose ink-and-watercolor illustrations throughout.
- Black Beauty: Anna Sewell's classic, adapted for grades 3–4 across five illustrated episodes, told (as it should be) in the horse's own voice.
- Sharks: a six-part nonfiction reader for kids who can't get enough of the ocean.
A new home screen
The Home tab got a redesign. Instead of one flat grid, you'll now see a featured story up top that you can swipe through, and below it, shelves organized by genre that scroll sideways, a bit like the streaming apps your kids already know how to navigate. The featured picks rotate each time you open the app, so there's always something new to notice. We also renamed the Browse tab to Search, since that's what it's really for.
From the team
Interactive Fiction has been the most fun thing we've built in a while, and we're just getting started with it. More branching stories are on the way. As always, everything in Worldly is free right now, so open the app and let your kid pick their own adventure.
What's New: June 2026
June 21, 2026 · The Worldly Team
New in the library
Four new titles this month, all illustrated:
- The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame's classic adapted for grades 3–4 across six episodes, with 41 original watercolor-and-ink illustrations. Mole's first day on the river, the Wild Wood in winter, Toad's jailbreak: the whole arc, modernized but faithful.
- Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure across the Scottish Highlands, adapted for grades 3–4 in five episodes.
- The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells's Martian invasion, adapted and illustrated.
- Wild Sands, a new Level 3 nonfiction reader in flipbook format.
Rate the stories you read
After finishing a story, you'll now see a star-rating prompt on the completion screen. Tap to rate it 1–5 stars. Averages show up on story cards as you browse, so you and your kids can see what other readers are enjoying. It's a small thing, but it makes the library feel more alive.
Flipbook and dictionary improvements
The flipbook reader we launched last month got a full rebuild under the hood. Page-turning is smoother, each page loads independently with its own spinner, and it no longer shares code with the chapter reader. If your kid reads picture books or nonfiction flipbooks, it should feel noticeably better.
We also added over 170 words to the built-in dictionary, including Hebrew and Arabic heritage terms that appear in stories like Sophia's Unofficial Guide and The Attic Archives. Long-press "matzah" or "habibi" and you'll get a real definition now.
From the team
We've made all content in Worldly free for the time being. No subscription required, no paywall, just open the app and read. We're also excited to be experimenting with choose-your-own-adventure stories, where readers make choices that branch the narrative. More on that soon.
What's New: May 2026
May 17, 2026 · The Worldly Team
Flipbook mode for picture books and early readers
This is the big one. Illustrated stories and early readers now display in a page-by-page flipbook format — swipe or tap to turn pages, with full images centered on each page. It makes picture books feel like actual books instead of long scrolls, and it's especially nice on tablets.
We built flipbook mode alongside a wave of new content designed for it:
- A Dog Named Sheep and Bazooka Pooka — two bedtime picture books with full-page illustrations
- Big Wonders — a nonfiction series for Level 3 readers, also in flipbook format. Nonfiction in particular benefits from the page-at-a-time layout, where each spread pairs a concept with an image.
- Four new early-reader series with five episodes — short, illustrated, and designed for kids just crossing from "learning to read" into "reading to learn"
More stories in the library
For chapter-book readers, we added:
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — a full classic adaptation for grades 3–4, with three seasons and six episodes of mysteries. Our biggest single title yet.
- Wren Figures It Out — original contemporary fiction
- Out There — original sci-fi
- Mira and the Glowing Mushroom — original fantasy
Built-in dictionary
Long-press any word while reading and you'll get a kid-friendly definition right in the reader. No switching apps, no losing your place. We wrote the definitions ourselves to keep them clear and age-appropriate. A simple routine that works well: when your kid hits a word they don't know, have them long-press it, read the definition together, then re-read the sentence. Ten seconds, builds vocabulary, doesn't break the story's flow.
Subscription and free trial
Worldly now runs on a subscription with a 7-day free trial. Start reading everything in the library today at no cost, and if your family is getting value from it, keep going. Manage your subscription anytime from the profile page.
From the team
This month was about making Worldly work for younger readers — flipbook mode, the dictionary, and a wave of early-reader and picture book content. We're building toward a library where every kid from age 5 to 14 can find something genuinely good. More coming next month.
What's New: April 2026
April 12, 2026 · The Worldly Team
Worldly is now on iOS and Android
We're live in the app stores! You can download Worldly today on the App Store or Google Play. This is still Early Access mode, but we've been working toward this for a while, and it feels great to have it out in the world.
Seven new stories in the library
We've been busy. This month we added a wave of new reading to Worldly, a mix of reimagined classics and original series:
- The Monkey King - A 10-episode retelling of Journey to the West, fully illustrated. Follow the irrepressible Monkey King as he causes chaos in heaven, gets trapped under a mountain, and sets off on an epic journey west.
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Captain Nemo and the Nautilus, adapted for younger readers.
- Treasure Island - Jim Hawkins, Long John Silver, and a map that starts it all.
- Peter Pan - Neverland, reimagined and illustrated.
- Around the World in 80 Days - Phileas Fogg's race against the clock, with scene illustrations throughout.
- Last Stop in the Universe - An original sci-fi series set at the edge of known space. Two episodes out so far.
- My Fairy Life - Original contemporary fiction. Two episodes available.
A faster, smoother reading experience
Under the hood, we made the app noticeably faster. Images load more quickly and are cached so they don't re-download. Navigation between chapters now shows a proper loading screen instead of a blank flash. And we added a reading-level onboarding step for new readers. The library now filters to the reader's grade level by default, so they see stories that are right for them.
From the team
This is our first blog post! We'll be sharing updates here each month or so: new stories, app improvements, and the occasional reading tip. If you have questions or feedback, you can always reach us at support@readworldly.com. We'd love to hear from you.