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