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Comment by rfarley04 | Hacker News Reader

But all my friends on Goodreads are claiming to finish a book a week

Are... Are they LYING?? No one lies on the internet.

EDIT: Wow I guess I hit a, nerve. Sorry folks. I use Goodreads and finish about a book a month. So I don't think a book a week is unreasonable/impossible. I just meant to allude to the fact that the platform has gotten a lot of attention for review bombing and profile manipulation.

Anyways, here is some data (not MAU, to be fair) about US stats:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/most_read?category=all&countr...

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I know this is humor but:

a. the original poll this article is based on says that 1% of the US population reads 50+ books a week; 1% of 3.3*10^8 people is still a lot of people.

b. some books are much easier to read than others, are your friends just kicking back once a week with a competently-written potboiler in a genre they've been reading half their life, or are they reading one abstruse 800-page tome after another? Or are they reading kid's books to a child in their life?

Lying's certainly a possibility too, but so's marking something as "read" when you actually abandoned it somewhere before the end - and that's a spectrum too; when I read Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" I abandoned it about ten pages before the end but I'd still say I "read" it. If I'd only gotten ten pages in I wouldn't say that.

There was span of a couple years when I had to commute ~3 hours per day. I easily completed 1-2 audiobooks per week.

But more to your point, what percentage of the population do you think is active on goodreads? I can't find any MAU numbers for them, just total membership numbers. Regardless, it is a self-selecting audience. Much like if you go to a theater to see the latest garbage marvel movie, the people in that theater are probably very likely to have seen other marvel movies in the theater recently too.

I finish about a book a week, reading a couple of hours a night before sleep. It's not unreasonable.

I’m all for reading, but a couple of hours every night is a very big time investment.

People with children are often lucky to have 30 minutes for themselves.

Audiobooks, my friend.

Self-selection: Goodreads main function is to recommend a next book to read to people who like reading. No wonder Goodreads users read more than an average American.

Or, perhaps, the sort of person who spends time on a website centered around reading is unsurprisingly in the top percentiles of reading amount.

My mum is on that rate when she's not super busy, so I don't think that's a lie. Some people read like machines

I get through an average novel in 1-2 days, either in dead tree or ebook format on my phone.

How many friends do you have?

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