How long does it take to read a book?
Divide the book’s word count by your reading speed. The average adult reads fiction silently at about 260 words a minute, so an 80,000-word novel takes about 5 hours 8 minutes, or 31 days at 10 minutes a day. Below are the real numbers for every book on Scrolls, counted from the editions you read in the app.
Reading times for books on Scrolls
| Book | Words | Time | Days at 10 min | On Scrolls |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll, 1865 | 26,335 | 1 h 41 min | 11 | Free |
| A Study in Scarlet Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887 | 43,188 | 2 h 46 min | 17 | Scrolls Library |
| The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin Maurice Leblanc, 1907 | 53,703 | 3 h 27 min | 21 | Scrolls Library |
| The Innocence of Father Brown G. K. Chesterton, 1911 | 78,812 | 5 h 3 min | 31 | Scrolls Library |
| The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle, 1892 | 104,351 | 6 h 41 min | 41 | Free |
How many books can you read in 10 minutes a day?
Ten minutes a day at 260 words a minute is 2,600 words a day, about 949,000 words a year. That is roughly 11 80,000-word novels a year, or every book in the table above about 3 times over.
| Reading a day | Words a day | 80,000-word novels a year |
|---|---|---|
| 5 minutes | 1,300 | 5 |
| 10 minutes | 2,600 | 11 |
| 20 minutes | 5,200 | 23 |
| 30 minutes | 7,800 | 35 |
Why use 260 words a minute?
It is the average adult silent reading rate for English fiction found by a review of 190 studies with 18,573 participants (non-fiction averaged 238): Brysbaert (2019), “How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate”, Journal of Memory and Language 109. Your own speed may be faster or slower, so treat these times as a guide.
Why the numbers come from Scrolls
Scrolls splits every book into short chunks, one per screen, that you swipe through like a feed. Because we prepare each edition ourselves, we know exactly how many words and chunks it has, so these times are counted, not estimated from page numbers. A Scrolls chunk takes 6 to 8 seconds to read on average, depending on the book, which is why a few spare minutes are enough to make progress.
Turn spare minutes into finished books
Scrolls is coming soon to iPhone. Join the newsletter and we will email you when it launches.