Every January, reading becomes loud.
Screens fill with year-end wrap-ups. Bright graphics. Stacked numbers.
None of this is new, but the volume is.
Reading used to be something people mentioned in passing. Now it’s something people report. Counted. Tracked. Ranked. Shared publicly, often without context, and almost always reduced to a single number.
It’s not that people didn’t set reading goals before. Libraries have hosted summer reading challenges for decades. Schools have long encouraged the use of logs and lists. Bookclubs have tracked selections and progress forever. What’s changed today is that reading has a scoreboard, and it follows you everywhere.
Platforms like Goodreads, which reports tens of millions of users participating in its annual Reading Challenge, helped normalize book counts as the primary measure of a reading life. You don’t describe what you read or how it affected you. You set a number. You watch a progress bar fill. You finish, or you don’t.
For many readers, tracking tools are genuinely helpful. They offer structure, motivation, and a sense of progress. But somewhere along the way, the numbers began to carry more cultural weight than the experiences behind them.
Once reading became trackable, it became comparable. And once it became comparable, it quietly became competitive.
The Scoreboard Effect
A scoreboard does something subtle but powerful. It divides experiences into winners and losers. More is better. Faster is impressive. Falling behind feels like failure…even when no one explicitly says it out loud.
This shift mirrors broader digital behavior. Researchers studying social media engagement have found that visible metrics such as likes, streaks, follower counts, change how people behave and how they evaluate themselves. What was once intrinsic becomes performative. The activity doesn’t disappear, but the motivation shifts.
Reading has quietly followed the same path.
A yearly book count doesn’t tell you much. It doesn’t show rereads. It doesn’t show books abandoned halfway through. It doesn’t show dense nonfiction that took weeks, or audiobooks listened to in ten-minute stretches between errands. It doesn’t show the parent who read three chapters a night until exhaustion won. It doesn’t show the reader who needed months to finish one novel because life kept interrupting.
The scoreboard strips all of that away. It changes reading expectations.
What remains is speed and volume—the most visible, most shareable parts of reading. A post that says “I read 200 books this year” travels farther than “I read slowly and loved it.” Algorithms reward extremes. Quiet experiences rarely trend.
That doesn’t make high-volume readers dishonest or wrong. It just means their reading lives are different, and the internet flattens those differences into something that looks universal.
The pressure shows up in quieter ways. People stop posting their goals. They stop joining challenges. Some stop reading altogether, not because they have lost interest in books, but because reading has started to feel like another area where they are falling behind.
Surveys consistently show that many adults want to read more than they do. A 2025 NPR/Ipsos poll found that while most Americans read at least one book a year, time, stress, and competing demands are major barriers to reading.
What’s rarely discussed is how comparison intensifies that gap. When reading is framed publicly as a productivity metric, people who already feel stretched thin are the first to disengage. Not because they don’t care about books, but because hobbies aren’t supposed to feel like performance reviews.
The irony is that reading, historically, has been resistant to standardization. People read for different reasons, at different speeds, in different seasons of life. Some years are heavy. Some are light. Some are full of rereads. Some are quiet. None of that fits neatly on a scoreboard.
And yet, here we are. Counting. Comparing. Wondering why something that once felt restorative now carries a faint sense of pressure.
This article isn’t a call to abandon goals or stop tracking progress. It’s an acknowledgment that the dominant way we talk about reading has shifted, and that shift has consequences.
Thalia Mercer is a writer covering mystery and thriller fiction, with a focus on book-to-screen adaptations and contemporary reading culture. She writes about why certain stories resonate—and how they translate beyond the page.
