How many books can you read in a year? The arithmetic, honestly

At an average reading speed, twenty minutes a day, every day, comes to about 21 books a year of typical length. Thirty minutes a day comes to about 31. Twenty minutes on weekdays only comes to about 15. The number depends almost entirely on how many minutes you actually read, not on how fast you read them.

Those figures assume a 300-page book of about 82,500 words and a reading speed of 238 words a minute, which is the average for adult non-fiction. Change either assumption and the answer changes, which is why the working is set out below. The reading goal planner will do it with your own numbers.

How do you calculate how many books you can read?

Three numbers are enough: your reading speed in words per minute, the minutes you read in a year, and the length of a typical book in words.

1. Words you can read in a year = minutes per year × words per minute.
2. Words in a typical book = pages × words per page.
3. Books per year = the first number ÷ the second.

For speed, the most reliable average is from Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies and roughly 18,500 participants: about 238 words a minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. For book length, a printed page usually holds roughly 250 to 300 words, so 275 is a fair middle; a 300-page book is then about 82,500 words. If you would rather start from a word count, words to pages converts either way.

How many books is twenty minutes a day?

Here is the full working for the headline figure.

• Minutes per year: 20 × 365 = 7,300 minutes.
• Words per year at 238 wpm: 7,300 × 238 = 1,737,400 words.
• Books per year: 1,737,400 ÷ 82,500 ≈ 21 books.

And the two common variations:

• Thirty minutes a day, every day: 30 × 365 = 10,950 minutes × 238 = 2,606,100 words ÷ 82,500 ≈ 31 books.
• Twenty minutes on weekdays only: 20 × 5 × 52 = 5,200 minutes × 238 = 1,237,600 words ÷ 82,500 ≈ 15 books.

Notice how much the minutes matter compared with the speed. Going from twenty minutes to thirty adds ten books. Reading ten per cent faster, which is a realistic gain for most people with practice, adds about two. We go into why in How to read faster.

How many minutes a day for a given goal?

Turned the other way round, the same arithmetic tells you what a goal costs. Using the same 82,500-word book and 238 words a minute:

• 12 books a year (one a month): 12 × 82,500 = 990,000 words ÷ 238 ≈ 4,160 minutes ÷ 365 ≈ 11 to 12 minutes a day.
• 24 books a year (two a month): twice that, about 23 minutes a day.
• 52 books a year (one a week): 52 × 82,500 = 4,290,000 words ÷ 238 ≈ 18,025 minutes ÷ 365 ≈ 49 minutes a day.

A book a month is gentler than most people expect: a little over ten minutes a day. A book a week is a real commitment of close to an hour every day, and it is worth knowing that before you announce it in January.

Does fiction change the numbers?

A little. Fiction reads faster on average, about 260 words a minute rather than 238, and novels vary widely in length. A typical novel runs 70,000 to 100,000 words. At 260 words a minute, an 80,000-word novel takes about 308 minutes, or a little over five hours.

So twenty minutes a day spent on novels of that length comes to: 7,300 × 260 = 1,898,000 words ÷ 80,000 ≈ 23 novels a year. Slightly more than the non-fiction figure, for two reasons that both point the same way: shorter books and a faster pace.

Dense non-fiction pulls the other way. A book you are reading carefully, with a pen, might go at well under the average, and that is fine; it simply counts for more than one book's worth of time. For a book-by-book estimate, the reading time calculator is quicker than doing it by hand, and How long does it take to read a book? has the common lengths worked out.

Is it better to set a books-per-year goal or a minutes-per-day goal?

For most people, minutes. A books-per-year goal has two quiet problems. It rewards short, easy books over the ones you actually wanted to read, and it gives you a single verdict at the end of the year when it is too late to adjust. A daily-minutes goal is something you can keep or miss today, and the books take care of themselves.

That said, a minutes goal assumes your reading happens in steady daily portions. Not everyone works that way. Some people read nothing for two weeks and then a whole book over a weekend, and for them a daily target is a machine for producing small failures. If that sounds like you, a weekly or monthly total is a better fit than a streak. The same mismatch, in another form, is a large part of why self-help books often do not work.

How do you actually read more books this year?

Practical advice, none of it new, all of it more effective than reading faster:

• Attach reading to something you already do. The commute, the first coffee, the half hour before sleep. A fixed slot is easier to keep than a free-floating intention.
• Keep the book where the phone usually is. The competition for those minutes is rarely another book.
• Stop books you are not enjoying. A book you dread opening costs you the days you do not read at all. Giving up on it is not a failure; it is a scheduling decision.
• Have the next book ready. The gap between finishing one book and choosing the next is where a lot of reading years quietly stall.
• Count honestly. If your goal is twenty books, twenty short ones and twenty long ones are not the same year. Track minutes as well if you want the real picture.

Does it matter how many books you read?

Less than the number makes it look. A count is a useful way to protect the habit, and the habit is worth protecting. But one book read slowly and acted on can change more than ten read to hit a total. If your reading is mainly for ideas you want to use, the question is not how many but how many you came back to.

A useful habit, if you want the count to mean something, is to keep a single line for each book you finish: what you will do differently because of it. Some books will get a blank line, and that is honest. The ones that do not are the ones worth re-reading next year, and a re-read counts as a book as far as anyone sensible is concerned.

It is partly for that reason that the books on this site are short. Each one is written after a twenty-one-scene reading to the way you actually move, so it takes an evening or two rather than a fortnight, and the hours it asks for are spent on pages that were written with you in mind.