Quick answer
7 h
Average adult, 238 words per minute
6.4 h
Fiction at 260 words per minute
10.8 h
Audiobook at about 155 words per minute
333โ400
Paperback pages at 250โ300 words a page
Reading speeds from Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies, published in the Journal of Memory and Language. Audiobook pace from the industry rule of thumb of about 9,300 words per finished hour.
Reading time by speed
The formula is simple: words divided by words per minute, divided by 60. What changes everything is the speed you plug in. Brysbaert's review found adults read English non-fiction silently at about 238 words per minute and fiction at about 260, with most readers falling between roughly 175 and 300. Claims of 1,000 words per minute with full comprehension do not survive testing.
Reading aloud is far slower, around 180 words per minute in the same research, which is why a narrated audiobook takes longer than silent reading for most people.
Reading time calculator
Plug in any word count, a reading speed and how long a reader actually reads per day.
Total reading time
7 hours
Days to finish
10 days
As an audiobook
10.8 hours
Paperback pages
about 333โ400
Not sure of your exact count? Paste a chapter into the free word counter, which also estimates reading time.
Famous books and how long they take
Word counts below are the widely cited approximate figures for each book. Reading times use the average speed of 238 words per minute.
| Book | Approx. words | Reading time |
|---|---|---|
| The Great Gatsby | 47,000 | 3.3 h |
| Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone | 77,000 | 5.4 h |
| 1984 | 89,000 | 6.2 h |
| The Hobbit | 95,000 | 6.7 h |
| The Hunger Games | 100,000 | 7 h |
| Pride and Prejudice | 122,000 | 8.5 h |
| A Game of Thrones | 293,000 | 20.5 h |
A 100,000-word novel is a long single evening for nobody and a comfortable week of bedtime reading for most people.
What 100,000 words means for writers
One hundred thousand words is a common benchmark because it sits near the upper limit agents like to see for a debut in many genres. Romance and mystery debuts usually run shorter, epic fantasy runs longer. Our guide to how many words are in a novel breaks the ranges down by genre.
Think about it from the reader's side. Seven hours of reading split across a week means your reader comes back to your book six or seven times. Every return is a chance to lose them, which is why chapter endings matter so much in long books. A chapter of 2,500 to 3,500 words takes about 10 to 15 minutes to read, a comfortable single sitting; see how many chapters a book needs for structuring the whole.
If you plan an audiobook, 100,000 words means roughly 10 to 11 finished hours, which is a real production cost when you hire a narrator. AIWriteBook's audiobook generator turns a finished manuscript into a narrated audiobook inside the app, so the length of your book stops being a budget question.
Planning a 100,000-word novel?
AIWriteBook outlines the whole book, drafts chapter by chapter in your voice, and keeps track of characters across every page.
Common mistakes when estimating
- Using skimming speed. Readers who skim at 500 words per minute are not reading every word, and they are not your typical reader.
- Converting pages to hours without checking words per page. A large-print hardcover and a mass-market paperback of the same book have very different page counts. Use our guide to words on one page instead.
- Forgetting dialogue. Dialogue-heavy fiction reads faster than dense description, so the same word count can feel shorter.
- Assuming longer means more value. Readers judge a book by whether the hours felt earned, not by how many there were.
Reading time FAQ
About 7 hours at the average adult silent reading speed of 238 words per minute. A fast reader at 300 words per minute needs about 5.6 hours, and a slower reader at 150 words per minute about 11 hours.
Roughly 333 to 400 pages in a typical paperback, which holds 250 to 300 words per page. Trim size, font and spacing move this number a lot.
Around 10 to 11 hours. Narrators average roughly 9,300 words per finished hour, about 155 words per minute.
It depends on the genre. It is fine for fantasy and science fiction and on the long side for romance, mystery and most thrillers, where 70,000 to 90,000 is more typical.
Seven hours of someone's attention
A 100,000-word book asks a reader for about seven hours. That number is a useful writing tool: it tells you how many times the reader will put your book down, and how many chapter endings have to pull them back.
Plan the whole book, from idea to final draft, with our guide to writing a book.