Loyal Books re-dated 4,863 audiobook feeds to January 2026, so 4,670 of them read as 2025 podcast launches

When we grouped the Podcast Index dump of 16 August 2026 by start year for the Spreaker post, loyalbooks.com came in eighth among 2025 starts with 4,670 feeds, ahead of Captivate, Libsyn and Substack. Loyal Books publishes public domain audiobooks, one feed per book. We expected a bulk upload in 2025. There was none.

All 4,670 of those feeds were in the index before 2024. Podcast Index added 691 of them in 2020, 3,972 in 2021, 1 in 2022 and 6 in 2023. Start year in our counts means the year of the oldest episode in the feed, and that is where the 2025 comes from.

Every chapter gets a date counted back from 2 January

Loyal Books has 10,552 feeds in the dump with 231,386 episodes between them. 10,526 carry episode dates. In all 10,526 the newest episode is dated 2 January. In 10,524 the oldest episode is exactly one day earlier per chapter: a book with 27 chapters runs from 7 December to 2 January.

The year of that 2 January depends on when the feed was last rebuilt.

The live feed for E. E. Smith's Subspace Survivors still reads that way on 5 November 2026: four chapters dated 30 December 2025 to 2 January 2026.

Long books start in December, so they land in 2025

A book dated to end on 2 January 2026 starts in 2026 only if it has two chapters or fewer. Anything longer starts in late 2025. Of the 4,670 feeds with a 2025 oldest episode, 4,662 end on 2 January 2026 and 8 on 2 January 2025. 3,845 start in December 2025, 646 in November and 123 in October. 4,155 of the 4,863 feeds dated to 2026 were added to the index in 2021.

What it does to the 2025 count

356,901 feeds in the dump have an oldest episode in 2025. 22,430 of them were added to the index before 2025, and Loyal Books is 4,670 of those, 20.8%. The next hosts are far behind: 1,237 on Anchor, 945 on Podbean and 936 on Spreaker that the index added before 2024.

Without Loyal Books the 2025 start cohort is 352,231 feeds. The ranking of the large hosts in the Spreaker post does not change. Anyone counting podcast launches by first episode date gets about 4,700 audiobooks from 2020 and 2021 in the 2025 column, and the same feeds will move again when the site next rebuilds them.

How we counted

Source: the Podcast Index feed dump of 16 August 2026, 4,711,475 rows. Loyal Books feeds are the 10,552 rows with host loyalbooks.com. Start year is the year of oldestItemPubdate, added year is the year of createdOn. The one-day-per-chapter check compares the days between oldestItemPubdate and newestItemPubdate with episodeCount minus one. 10,550 of the 10,552 feeds carry an Apple Podcasts id.