How Long Does It Take to Read a Book?

It’s the question behind every “should I start this book?” hesitation: how long is this actually going to take me? You want a number before you commit. The good news is there’s a clean way to get one — and once you have it, you’ll also see why the number on paper is almost always longer in real life, and what to do about it.

The one-line formula

Reading time comes down to three things: how many words are in the book, how fast you read, and how consistently you actually do it. The first two give you the raw estimate:

Word count ÷ your words-per-minute ÷ 60 = hours.

Most adults read prose at roughly 200–250 words per minute, and we cover the full range in average reading speed. An average book runs about 90,000 words. So:

90,000 ÷ 225 ÷ 60 ≈ 6.7 hours of focused reading.

That’s your floor — the time it would take if you never stopped, never re-read a line, and never lost focus.

A quick cheat sheet

If you’d rather not do math, here are ballpark figures at an average pace:

• Short non-fiction / novella (40,000 words): ~3 hours
• Average novel (90,000 words): ~6.5–7 hours
• Long novel (130,000 words): ~9.5 hours
• Doorstopper (200,000+ words): 15+ hours

Don’t know a book’s word count? A rough rule is ~300 words per page, so multiply the page count by 300 and run the formula. And if you want your exact speed instead of the average, time yourself reading a single page, then divide its word count by the minutes it took.

Why the real number is bigger

Here’s the part the formula leaves out. The estimate assumes a perfectly attentive reader, and nobody reads like that. In real life you:

• Re-read sentences when your mind wandered.
• Stop and start, losing momentum each time you pick the book back up.
• Slow down on hard passages — a dense chapter can halve your pace.
• Get tired. Reading is close-focus work, and fatigue quietly drags your speed down, which is exactly why reading makes you tired.

Add it all up and a “6.5 hour” book often eats 9 or 10 real hours, spread over weeks. That gap between the clean estimate and the messy reality is where most books go to die on a nightstand.

The faster path: listening

This is where the calculation changes shape entirely. Narration runs at about 150–160 words per minute — slower than silent reading at first glance. But two things flip the math in your favor.

First, you can speed it up. Nudge to 1.5× and you’re at 225+ words per minute; at 2× you’re well past most readers’ silent pace, as we explain in reading faster by listening at 2×. The narration stays clear and your comprehension holds.

Second — and this is the bigger one — you can listen in time you could never read in. A 6.5-hour book is daunting if it has to come out of your sitting-still hours. It’s almost trivial if it rides along on your commute, your dishes, your dog walk and your gym sessions. Suddenly the question isn’t “where do I find 7 quiet hours?” but “which of this week’s unused hours do I want to fill?”

💡 Want a true calendar estimate? Take the book’s audio length, divide by the speed you listen at, then divide by your realistic daily listening minutes. A 7-hour book at 1.5× is ~4.5 hours — about a week if you listen 40 minutes a day on your commute.

So, how long will it take you?

The formula gives you the honest floor: word count ÷ your pace ÷ 60. Reality adds a tax for interruptions and fatigue on top of that. The way to pay less tax isn’t to read faster by force — it’s to stop reserving books for the rare quiet hour and start listening in the time you already have. Try Frateca free, turn your next book into audio, and watch a multi-week read collapse into this week’s commutes.