Time & Pace Math · 3
Exact page-to-hour benchmarks: how long it takes to read 100, 300, or 500 pages, WPM tables, and yearly book math.
Across 190 empirical studies (Brysbaert, 2019), the average adult silent reading speed is 238 words per minute (WPM) for non-fiction and 260 WPM for fiction. On a standard 260-word book page, that equals roughly 0.9 to 1.0 pages per minute—or 50 to 60 pages per hour.
At an average adult silent reading speed of 250 words per minute (~1.1 minutes per trade paperback page), a 200-page book takes ~3 hours 40 minutes, a 400-page book takes ~7 hours 20 minutes, and a 500-page book takes ~9 hours 10 minutes. Reading 20 pages a day finishes them in 10, 20, and 25 days respectively.
For an average adult reading at 250 words per minute (WPM), a standard 300-page book (approximately 75,000 to 84,000 words) takes between 5.5 and 6 hours of total reading time. If you read 20 pages per day—about 24 minutes each evening—you will finish a 300-page book in exactly 15 days.
