How Long Does It Take to Read a Book?
The short answer, for an average novel of around 90,000 words read at an ordinary adult pace of 250 words per minute: about six hours.
The longer answer is more useful, because “a book” ranges from 47,000 words to 587,000, and “an ordinary pace” ranges from 150 to 600 depending on who is reading and what they are reading. Both numbers matter, and one of them you can change.
The arithmetic
There is only one formula and it is not complicated:
hours = words ÷ words-per-minute ÷ 60
Everything else on this page is either finding the first number or improving the second.
Real books, real numbers
| Book | Words (approx.) | 250 WPM | 400 WPM | 600 WPM |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Old Man and the Sea | 27,000 | 1.8 h | 1.1 h | 45 min |
| The Great Gatsby | 47,000 | 3.1 h | 2.0 h | 1.3 h |
| Fahrenheit 451 | 46,000 | 3.1 h | 1.9 h | 1.3 h |
| Brave New World | 64,000 | 4.3 h | 2.7 h | 1.8 h |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | 89,000 | 5.9 h | 3.7 h | 2.5 h |
| Pride and Prejudice | 122,000 | 8.1 h | 5.1 h | 3.4 h |
| Jane Eyre | 183,000 | 12.2 h | 7.6 h | 5.1 h |
| Crime and Punishment | 211,000 | 14.1 h | 8.8 h | 5.9 h |
| Moby-Dick | 209,000 | 13.9 h | 8.7 h | 5.8 h |
| Anna Karenina | 349,000 | 23.3 h | 14.5 h | 9.7 h |
| Les Misérables | 545,000 | 36.3 h | 22.7 h | 15.1 h |
| War and Peace | 587,000 | 39.1 h | 24.5 h | 16.3 h |
Word counts are commonly cited approximations and vary by edition and translation — a Russian novel in particular can differ by tens of thousands of words between translators. Treat them as a good estimate, not a measurement.
Why “pages” tells you almost nothing
Every reading-time question starts with a page count, and page counts are close to meaningless.
A mass-market paperback runs roughly 250 to 300 words per page. A large-print edition of the same book might manage 180. A dense academic hardback can exceed 500. So a “400-page book” is anywhere between 72,000 and 200,000 words — a spread of nearly three to one. Two books with identical page counts can differ by a full working day of reading.
Worse, on a phone or e-reader the page is not a unit at all. It changes when you change the font size.
Words are the only stable unit, which is why any tool that estimates your reading time should be counting words, and why ReadKinetic estimates in sittings and chapters remaining rather than pages.
What speed should you actually put in the formula?
Not the one you would like. The measured numbers are lower than most people assume:
- Adults reading non-fiction for comprehension: roughly 200–250 WPM.
- Adults reading fiction: 250–300 WPM, because narrative prose is more predictable.
- Practised readers using a paced reader: 400–500 WPM with comprehension holding up on ordinary prose.
- Technical, legal or unfamiliar academic material: 100–200 WPM, and that is normal, not a deficiency.
If someone quotes you a number above about 700, ask what comprehension test it survived. The research on very high reading speeds is consistent and unkind: past a certain point you are sampling the page, not reading it. That is a legitimate thing to do — it is called skimming — but it should not be sold as reading.
Measure your own instead of guessing
You can settle this in three minutes. Read a passage of known length at a comfortable pace, time it, and divide. The passage below runs at 300 words per minute — a little above average. If it feels rushed, your natural pace is lower. If it feels slow, it is higher.
The part that compounds
A single book at 400 words per minute instead of 250 saves you a couple of hours. That is pleasant but not life-changing, and if that were the whole story this would be a hobby rather than a tool.
The number that matters is the annual one. Twenty books a year at 90,000 words each is 1.8 million words. At 250 WPM that is 120 hours. At 400 it is 75. The difference is 45 hours — more than a full working week, recovered, every year.
Or, put the other way round and rather more usefully: at the same 120 hours you would have spent anyway, 400 words per minute is thirty-two books instead of twenty.
Reading speed is one of the few skills where a modest, realistic improvement compounds across everything you will ever read. You do not need 1,000 WPM. Going from 250 to 400 is enough to change what your reading year looks like.
Why your real-world time is worse than the arithmetic
Six hours for a 90,000-word novel assumes six hours of actual reading. Nobody has that. The realistic figure is worse for reasons that have nothing to do with your speed:
Restarting costs. Every time you pick a book back up, you spend a minute or two finding your place and rebuilding context. Twenty sittings is twenty of those.
Regressions. Your eyes drift backward to re-read sentences you already understood, reflexively, especially when tired. Estimates put this at 10–20% of reading time for typical readers.
Abandonment. The largest cost by far, and the one nobody counts. A book you stop reading at 40% took you two and a half hours and returned nothing. The strongest argument for reading faster is not efficiency — it is that a book you finish in three sittings is a book you finish.
This is the genuine case for a paced reader, and it is more modest than the marketing: it removes the mechanical overhead (saccades, the return sweep, reflexive backtracking), it makes the remaining time predictable, and predictable time is what lets you actually schedule reading instead of hoping for it.
Working out the number for your book
For a book you own, you do not need a table. Two ways:
The rough way. Count the words on three full pages, average them, and multiply by the page count. Five minutes, and accurate to within about ten percent.
The exact way. Import the file into something that counts. ReadKinetic parses an EPUB or PDF on your own device and tells you the real word count, the time remaining at your current pace for that book, and roughly how many sittings are left — because “about three sittings” is a far more actionable number than “412 pages.”
It keeps a separate speed per book, too, which matters more than it sounds: the pace you read a thriller at and the pace you read a philosophy text at are not the same number, and averaging them gives you an estimate that is wrong for both.
Find out how long your book actually takes.
Import an EPUB or PDF and see the real word count and time remaining — at your own pace, on your own device, nothing uploaded.
Open ReadKinetic → · Read EPUBs faster →
Keep reading: What Is the Average Reading Speed? · How to Train Your WPM · How to Read Your Own Books Faster