How Long Will It Take to Read This Book?

The number everyone quotes is too high

A 300-page book, 275 words a page — 82,500 words:

Reading speed	Total time
300 wpm — the figure most calculators use	4h 35m
238 wpm — the meta-analysis figure	5h 47m

An hour and twelve minutes of difference, on one book, from one constant.

If a reading estimate has ever told you six hours and it took you nine, this is a likely reason.

Where 238 comes from

Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Memory and Language pooled 190 studies covering 18,573 participants — the largest synthesis of adult reading rates available.

Reading	Average
Silent, non-fiction	238 wpm
Silent, fiction	260 wpm
Aloud	183 wpm (77 studies, 5,965 people)

Fiction is faster mostly because its words are shorter.

And the paper says the quiet part out loud: these estimates are lower than the numbers commonly cited in both scientific and popular writing. The 250–300 figures in circulation aren't a different measurement — they're an overestimate, and the paper spends a section on why.

But you are not the average

The same meta-analysis puts the realistic spread at 175–300 wpm for non-fiction and 200–320 for fiction. Across that range, the same 300-page book is:

Speed	Time
175 wpm	7h 51m
238 wpm	5h 47m
300 wpm	4h 35m

Three hours and sixteen minutes between a slow reader and a fast one, on one book. That's why Your reading speed is an input rather than something baked in.

Time yourself for ten minutes on the actual book. It's the single highest-value thing on this page, and it beats every default.

The lazy version of the same check: look at Pages per sitting. On the defaults it says 26. Read for your usual half hour and count. If you got through 18, your speed isn't 238.

Words per page matters as much as you do

Around 275 is typical for a trade paperback. But:

• Dense academic hardback: 400+
• Large-print or heavily illustrated: far fewer

That's a wider proportional range than the reading-speed spread. Counting three typical pages and averaging them takes a minute and removes more error than getting your wpm exactly right.

Skip the pages that are half chapter heading when you count. And leave the front matter, index and appendices out of the page count entirely — you weren't going to read them.

Where this stops working: study reading

The meta-analysis figures describe continuous prose read for comprehension. A novel. An article. A non-fiction book you're reading straight through.

They do not describe a textbook.

Same 82,500 words at a plausible study pace of 100 wpm: 13 hours 45 minutes instead of 5h 47m.

And even that undersells it, because studying isn't slow reading — it's a different activity. Re-reading a paragraph, stopping to think, taking notes and looking things up are not reading speed at all, and none of them are in any wpm figure.

The gap between reading a novel and studying a chapter is far larger than the gap between any two readers. If this is coursework, time yourself on a real chapter and use that.

The sittings figure is a pace, not a schedule

11.6 sittings at 30 minutes a day, on the defaults.

It assumes every session is exactly the same length and that you never miss one, which nobody manages. Its real use is answering the question people are actually asking before they start: is this book a week or a month?

That's a genuinely useful thing to know in advance — and it's a much better reason to run the numbers than optimising anything.

Print the reading plan sheet — it has a session log, which is how you find out what your reading speed actually is instead of borrowing someone's average.

Sources: Brysbaert 2019 — How many words do we read per minute? · Semantic Scholar record