This summer, the National Year of Reading is teaming up with sporting figures including Joe Wicks, Clare Balding and Georgia Stanway to encourage people to read. The initiative, part of the campaign’s Summer of Sport programme, links reading activity to major sporting events including Wimbledon, the Fifa Men’s World Cup, cricket and Formula 1.

Team captains like Wicks, Balding and Stanway will share book recommendations, discuss how reading has shaped their sporting interests, and encourage audiences to engage with reading in a range of formats.

The idea is simple. Millions of people already care deeply about sport. Rather than asking people to become interested in reading for its own sake, the campaign seeks to connect reading with interests they already have. It is a sensible approach, but it also raises a question that sits at the heart of many debates about reading today: what counts as reading?

Public discussions about reading often focus on quality. Debates about screen use, social media and reading habits frequently raise concerns about how much time people spend with long-form texts. We debate whether screens are replacing books. We argue about attention spans and “deep reading” (reading with intention).

Underlying many of these discussions is the........

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