---
title: "Reading Time Calculator for Books | Shelf Sonnet"
description: "Work out how long a book takes to read from its pages or word count and your speed, then time a short passage to find your own words per minute."
url: https://shelfsonnet.me/reading-time-calculator/
---

By the clock

# Reading time calculator

How long will a book take? Enter its pages or its word count and a reading speed, and see the time it needs and how many days that is at a few minutes a day.

## How the estimate works

Reading time is the number of words divided by your words per minute. A 320-page paperback with about 275 words a page holds roughly 88,000 words; at 260 words a minute that is about five and a half hours.

The speeds in the list come from a review of 190 studies of adult readers by Marc Brysbaert (2019): on average, adults read English non-fiction silently at about 238 words a minute, fiction at about 260, and aloud at about 183. They are averages; people vary widely, and the same reader slows down for dense text or a new subject.

**To count words per page**, take a full page, count the words in five full lines, divide by five and multiply by the number of lines on the page. Do this for two or three pages and take the average.

**The test** above times you on a 299-word story written for this site. Read it as you would a novel, not as fast as you can; the two questions afterwards are only a check that you took it in.

## Sources

- Marc Brysbaert, “How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate”, *Journal of Memory and Language* 109 (2019), 104047 ([doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047)): average silent reading rates of 238 words a minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction, and 183 for reading aloud.
- Words per page for each kind of book are rough starting points chosen for this calculator, not measurements; count your own book for a better figure.

## Questions

**What is a good reading speed?**

There is no single good speed. Brysbaert’s review puts the adult average for silent reading of English at about 238 words a minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. Reading much faster usually means skimming and remembering less.

**How many words are on a page?**

It depends on the page size, the type and the margins, so the presets are only a starting point. Counting a few lines of your own copy, as described above, gives a much better number.

**Does the test save my result?**

No. The timing happens in your browser and nothing is stored or sent; press “Use this speed above” to carry your result into the calculator.