Reading time calculator: how long will it take to read that book?
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A 90,000 word novel takes about 5 hr 46 min to read, at the pooled average adult reading speed for fiction of 260 words a minute.
- 7 hr 30 min at the slower end of the published range.
- 4 hr 41 min at the faster end.
- About 9 hr 41 min as an audiobook.
Every figure here is an estimate with its working shown, and every source is named further down the page.
What it cannot tell you is how much of a book you will actually finish. It measures pace, not attention, and it assumes you read straight through without distraction.
Compiled by Sera Voss, who publishes this site and writes science fiction romance.
For your own pace, take the reading speed test below and put the book’s length in.
A 90,000 word standalone is what that first figure describes, and this site publishes one. Its first three chapters are free and take about 46 min.
Measure your reading speed, then estimate the reading time
Most reading time calculators assume an average reading speed. This one measures yours, because your own pace is the only number the answer actually turns on.
Step 1. Your reading speed
Read one short passage at your normal pace. It takes about a minute and nothing is stored or sent anywhere.
Or skip it and use the pooled adult average for fiction, 260 words a minute, which is what the controls below start on.
Step 2. The book
Or start from a book people ask about:
The Starfall Accord is the one this site publishes, and its first three chapters are free to time for yourself.
Any book. Put its word count in, switch to pages, or pick one above.
Put a length in above, or pick one of the four books, and the times appear here.
How to use the reading time calculator
- Take the one minute reading speed test above, or type your own words per minute straight into the slider.
- Give it the book: a word count, a page count, or a chapter you paste in.
- Read off the reading time using your own speed, the audiobook time, and the times at both ends of the published adult range.
The calculator uses 260 words per minute until you replace it with a speed of your own, so an untested answer is an average, not a measurement.
Why this reading time calculator measures your reading speed instead of assuming it
Nearly every reading time calculator online runs on a single fixed number, usually 200 or 250 words per minute, and quotes no source for it.
The estimate is then only as good as that guess about you.
The average adult silent reading speed for fiction in English, pooled across many studies, is 260 words per minute, and the published range runs from 200 to 320.
Between the two ends of that range, the same novel is either five hours or seven and a half.
That gap is too wide to guess at, so the test takes about a minute and removes it. It is a free reading time calculator, it runs entirely in your browser, and it asks you for nothing.
Most reading time calculators are built to stamp a blog post with a badge. This one converts words to time for a whole book.
How the reading time is calculated
To calculate reading time, divide the total word count by your reading speed in words per minute.
If you know the word count, put it in and the answer is exact.
If you only have a page count, the calculator converts it at 275 words per printed page, which is within the 225 to 300 range publishers use as a rule of thumb.
So a page based answer is an estimate built on an estimate.
You can also paste a chapter, a blog post or an article straight in and have the number of words counted in your browser.
Reading aloud is slower. The same study puts it at 183 words a minute, and an audiobook narrator is slower still, at 155, because speech is paced for a listener.
That is why the audiobook row below is always the longest.
How long it takes to read a 90,000 word novel, at four speeds
| Speed | Time to finish |
|---|---|
| 200 wpm, the slower end of the published adult range | 7 hr 30 min |
| 260 wpm, the pooled adult average for fiction | 5 hr 46 min |
| 320 wpm, the faster end of the published adult range | 4 hr 41 min |
| 155 wpm, listening rather than reading | 9 hr 41 min |
What changes your reading speed
The same review puts non fiction at 238 words a minute against 260 for fiction, which is the clearest evidence that the text matters as much as the reader. Complex material is read at slower speeds.
Readability works the same way: short sentences and familiar words move faster than dense prose.
Format matters less than most people expect, because the 2018 meta analysis cited below found screen and paper the same for speed.
This calculator assumes ordinary reading, with the subvocalization most people read with and comprehension you would be happy with. It says nothing about speed reading.
Attention is the part no calculator reaches. Most people read a novel in chunks, and the hours you actually spend reading decide whether you finish it.
Worked examples: books people ask about
Page counts below are the publisher’s own, read from the publisher’s website.
For the three books we did not publish, no publisher or author has released a word count. The sites that offer figures either call them a guess, or disagree by more than seventy thousand words on the same book.
So the word figures here are worked out from the page count, and marked as estimates.
| Book | Pages | Read at 260 wpm | As audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fourth WingRebecca Yarros · Entangled Publishing, Red Tower Books | 514 | 9 hr 4 min* | 15 hr 12 min* |
| A Court of Thorns and RosesSarah J. Maas · Bloomsbury Publishing | 448 | 7 hr 54 min* | 13 hr 15 min* |
| Leviathan WakesJames S. A. Corey · Orbit, Hachette Book Group | 592 | 10 hr 26 min* | 17 hr 30 min* |
| The Starfall Accord (ours)Sera Voss · Direct from the author | 327 | 5 hr 46 min | 9 hr 41 min |
* Worked from the publisher’s page count at 275 words per page, because no word count has been published for that title. The Starfall Accord is the one row with a stated word count, because its author states it, and it is the book this site publishes.
Where every number on this page comes from
The 260 and 238 words per minute figures, and the 200 to 320 range, are from Marc Brysbaert’s 2019 review and meta analysis of reading rate in the Journal of Memory and Language.
It pooled 190 studies and 18,573 participants. The abstract is on the author’s university record.
The 155 words per minute narration figure is ACX’s own, from Audible’s production help pages, which state that narrators record about 9,300 words per finished hour. That page is public.
The 225 to 300 words per printed page range is BookBaby’s, stated explicitly as a ballpark. The finding that screens are no slower than paper is from Kong, Seo and Zhai’s 2018 meta analysis in Computers and Education.
Everything the calculator prints is an approximate reading time with its working shown.
The rest of the reader tools
Knowing how long a book takes is only useful once you have chosen one. the shelf where nothing explicit is on the page filters by genre, trope and heat, free and with no account.
If you would rather answer for a mood than a genre, try the mood based reading picker, and for the science fiction shelf specifically there is the Next Read Picker.
Our own book is one of the four one tap examples in the calculator above, alongside three we did not publish. It is a complete standalone of about 90,000 words with a guaranteed happy ending and no cliffhanger, human only with no aliens, and closed door. the content warnings are listed openly, and the glossary of romance and space opera terms covers any term on this page that is new to you.
The other reader tools, all free
- the shelf where nothing explicit is on the page when the one thing that matters is that nothing explicit is on the page.
- the mood based reading picker when you know the mood you are in but not the book.
- the Next Read Picker for the science fiction shelf, with the human only and aliens filters.
Reading time calculator questions
What is the average reading speed for an adult?
260 words per minute for fiction and 238 for non fiction, from a 2019 study in the Journal of Memory and Language that combined 190 earlier studies and 18,573 readers.
Most adults reading fiction fall between 200 and 320 words a minute, so a result anywhere in that band is entirely normal.
How long does it take to read a 300 page book?
About 5 hr 17 min at the 260 words per minute fiction average, counting a printed page at 275 words.
Words per page varies between about 225 and 300 depending on trim size and type, so treat any page based answer as a range rather than a figure.
Putting the word count in instead removes that guess entirely.
How long is an audiobook of the same book?
Roughly 1.7 times the silent reading time. ACX, Audible's own production platform, states that narrators record about 9,300 words per finished hour, which is 155 words a minute.
A 90,000 word novel is therefore about 9 hr 41 min as audio, against 5 hr 46 min read silently at the fiction average.
Is reading on a screen slower than reading on paper?
No, at least not for speed. A 2018 meta analysis of 17 studies in Computers and Education found no significant difference in reading speed between screen and paper, though it did find comprehension was better on paper.
So this calculator applies no penalty for reading an ebook.
How long does The Starfall Accord take to read?
About 5 hr 46 min at the 260 words per minute fiction average. It is roughly 90,000 words across 22 chapters.
At the slower end of the adult range it is about 7 hr 30 min, and at the faster end about 4 hr 41 min.
How long is the free sample?
The first three chapters, about 12,000 words, which is roughly 46 min at the fiction average.
No email and no account are required for it. You can open it from the sample link in the answer above the calculator.