Reading Calculator

Josh Sherman
3 min read
Books

I recently had a conversation with somebody (a few people actually) about how much time I have to put in to read as much as I do. The short answer is, a lot. The longer answer is that it really depends on the individual and how you want to approach your reading goal.

First thing you have to figure out is how you want to attack things. One method, which my buddy Justin used to swear by is simply putting in the time. Every day he would read 30 minutes. For him this was roughly 15 pages per day.

Speaking of pages, another approach would be to read a certain number of pages per day. My wife mentioned reading chapters, but unlike pages, not every book has chapters.

For me, nothing beats trying to knock out a percentage of a book per day. It’s easy to track on an e-reader and it scales across books. Every book can be broken down into 10% chunks, regardless of size.

Obviously, these metrics really depend on your personal reading speed, the number and size of pages in the book and even the font size per page! For the sake of this calculator, I’m defaulting to the average adult reading speed of 200 WPM (find your reading speed here), an average of 250 words per page and an average book length of 350 pages.

As previously mentioned, this all came up because of some choice conversations over the last month or so. One conversation that really stuck out to me was one about how reading 10 books would be a huge milestone. I thought, what if we broke that down into manageable daily chunks? Turns out if you read a little less than 12 minutes a day, you could realistically knock out ten 350 page books in the next year!

So have at it, see what kinds of reading goals you can accomplish this year!

Reading speed (WPM)
Words per page
Pages per book
Minutes per day
Pages per day
Percentage per day
Number of days
Books

Got your plan? Ready to kill it? Why not Treat. Yo. Self. to a new book to start things off?

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About Josh

Husband. Father. Pug dad. Musician. Founder of Holiday API, Head of Engineering and Emoji Specialist at Mailshake, and author of the best damn Lorem Ipsum Library for PHP.

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