How long it takes to read a book
Your data
Two hundred and fifty words a minute is the usual pace for an adult reading prose for pleasure. Counting a page you have already read, with a clock, beats guessing.
Results
Days to finish it at that pace
—
| Words in the whole book | — |
| Hours of reading, all told | — |
| The day you would turn the last page | — |
| Pages you get through in one sitting of that length | — |
What other daily habits would do
| Minutes a day | Days | Weeks | Days saved by each extra ten minutes a day |
|---|
The last column is what ten more minutes a day are worth at each point, and it only falls. On a book of a hundred thousand words those ten minutes are worth twenty seven days to someone reading ten minutes a day and under one day to someone already reading ninety. The days are the total divided by your minutes, so the value of adding minutes drops as fast as the minutes climb.
The page count on its own says less than it looks. A page carries anywhere from two hundred to four hundred words depending on the trim, the typeface and how much dialogue there is, so the same four hundred pages can be eighty thousand words or a hundred and sixty thousand. That is twice the reading for the same number on the cover.
If the book is on a reader that shows a word count, use it and skip the page question entirely. That is the one number that does not change from edition to edition.
How long does it take to read a book of four hundred pages?
It depends far more on the book than the page count suggests. A page carries anywhere from two hundred to four hundred words depending on the trim, the typeface and how much dialogue there is, so four hundred pages is somewhere between eighty thousand and a hundred and sixty thousand words.
At two hundred and fifty words a minute, that same four hundred pages is five and a half hours at one end and ten and a half at the other. That is why this page asks how many words a page holds instead of pretending there is an average.
How fast do people actually read?
Around two hundred and fifty words a minute is the usual pace for an adult reading prose for pleasure, with most people between two hundred and three hundred. Technical or dense text is slower for everyone.
Rather than guessing, time yourself on a page you have already read and count the words on it. Your own number beats any average, and it is the only input here that is really about you.
Why does the page show days instead of hours?
Because nobody reads a book in one sitting, and the total in hours does not tell you when you will finish. What decides that is the habit: the minutes you actually give it on a normal day.
A hundred thousand words at two hundred and fifty words a minute is six and a half hours of reading. At twenty minutes a day that is twenty days, and at ten minutes a day it is forty.
Is it worth reading a little longer each day?
Enormously at the start and hardly at all later, because the days are the total divided by your minutes. Going from ten minutes a day to twenty cuts twenty days off that book. Going from ninety to a hundred cuts less than half a day.
The same ten minutes are worth fifty times more to someone who reads a little than to someone who already reads a lot. If you want the finish date to move, the cheapest place to find the minutes is at the bottom of the table, not the top.
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