Reading time calculator: how long will this book take?
Short answer
Reading time = words ÷ reading speed. A 300-page book holds about 82,500 words (≈275 per page); at the average 238 words per minute that is about 5 hours 47 minutes — or 12 days at 30 minutes a day.
Reading time
5 h 47 min
82,500 words
Finished in
12 days
at 30 min a day
As an audiobook
8 h 52 min
narration ≈ 155 wpm
The formula
Total words ÷ words per minute = minutes. If you only know the page count, multiply by the words on a page — about 275 for a typical printed book, fewer for large print or illustrated editions, more for dense academic text.
Worked examples at 238 wpm
- 200 pages (≈55,000 words) — about 3 h 51 min.
- 300 pages (≈82,500 words) — about 5 h 47 min.
- 400 pages (≈110,000 words) — about 7 h 42 min.
- A 90,000-word novel at 260 wpm (fiction) — about 5 h 46 min.
Turning hours into days
Hours are abstract; minutes a day are not. Enter how long you actually read on a normal day — the commute, the twenty minutes before sleep — and the calculator tells you when you will finish. To plan a whole year of books, use the reading goal planner.
Questions people also ask
- How long does it take to read a 300-page book?
- About 5 hours 47 minutes at the average adult speed of 238 words per minute, assuming roughly 275 words per page.
- How many words are on a page of a book?
- Around 250–300 in a typical paperback. Large print and children's books hold far fewer; academic books with small type can hold 400 or more.
- How long does an audiobook of the same book take?
- Narration usually runs at 150–160 words per minute, so audiobooks take roughly half as long again as reading silently at average speed.
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