Since the beginning of 2025, participants in the Year of Reading challenge have been able to record how many books and exactly how many pages they have read this year. The goal of Libri Bookstores’ attention-grabbing initiative was to convert the total number of pages into “distance” and have participants collectively “read around the world.” In 2025, the total number of pages read together exceeded 40,000 kilometers.
The journey covered the Baltic and Scandinavia, Western Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, Central and South America, Australia and Oceania, and finally Central and Eastern Europe. Libri Bookstores declared 2025 the Year of Reading, encouraging participants to learn about the continents, countries, and cultures of the world. These regions served as milestones in the Year of Reading challenge.
To promote books and reading, Libri invited readers to a year-long activity aimed at collecting as many pages as possible so that by the end of the year they would have “read around the Earth” along the Equator. As the pages accumulated, each month participants were guided to a new location—whether a nearby European country or a distant, unknown continent—through Libri’s world literature recommendations, allowing readers to discover diverse cultures.
Readers can continue recording pages until December 31. However, by mid-December, it was already clear that participants had achieved the challenge: based on the total pages read, they successfully “circumnavigated the Earth” along the Equator, reading exactly 267,166,780 pages. Libri converted the total page count into kilometers, assuming an average page height of 15 cm, which resulted in a “distance” exceeding the Equator’s length of 40,075 km.
Libri also encouraged an imaginary cultural and literary world tour and exploration of the literature of different regions, countries, and cultures through its ten-episode podcast series Világlapozó. Episodes covering literature from South America, Central Europe, Turkey, India, and the USA reveal fascinating facts—for example, that Hungarians often misread Hrabal; that real Latin America is full of stories similar to those of García Márquez; or that the world’s first novel was written by a Japanese court lady in the 11th century. Episodes of Világlapozó can be listened to on Libri’s Spotify and YouTube channels.
At the end of the Year of Reading, Libri will reward participants’ loyalty with valuable prizes: those who recorded the number of pages they read for at least six months between March and December 2025 will be entered into a draw to win one of three OTP Travel vouchers worth HUF 1,000,000 each. It’s still worth joining in the final days: participants who record book pages between December 1 and 31 can compete in a “book-collecting race” at Libri’s Nyugati tér store, where the goal is to collect as many books as possible within a set time.
Pages can be recorded at: libri.hu/olvasaseve.
