Reading is a skill that gets better with the more you read. And books are one of the best methods of getting new information (link). But one reason many people don’t read it because of the time it would take them to complete a book. How long to read 100 pages is a question that many people ask to get an estimate. What seems like a simple question is quite complicated when we started analyzing things.
Multiple factors step in when it comes to how long it takes to read 100 pages or any number of pages. What are these factors, we’ll discuss later in the article. Also how long would you take, at different reading speeds to complete some of the most famous novels?
How long to read 100 pages? The average speed
It is said that the average speed of reading is about 300 words per minute. By average, we mean normal literate people who can read and comprehend at a normal speed. Of course, some people read very fast and some who read very slow.
So at 300 words per minute, you’ll need 2 hours and 45 minutes approximately. At 100 pages per 2 hours and 45 minutes, a normal novel would take about 13 hours and 35 minutes (assuming the book is 500 pages long) of continuous reading. But no one reads in one sitting.
If you read for just an hour, you can complete the novel in around 14 days. Add one more similar book in a month you can complete two books. How many words did you read? About 500,000 words! That is a lot, just an average speed.
How long to read 200, 300, 400…words?
The rate of speed changes as you go through the book. This means that if it took you 3 hours to complete the first 100 pages, it might take you more than 3 hours to complete the next 100 pages. But still, we have put the numbers.
To read 200 pages, you’ll need about 5 hours and 40 minutes. For completing 300 pages, you’ll take about 8 hours and 20 minutes. For 400 pages. 10 hours and 55 minters and finally, as mentioned above, to complete 500 pages, it’ll take you about 13 hours 35 minutes.
Time is taken by fast readers.
The speed discussed above were for the average readers. But what about the fast ones? The ones who chew up books within a week? Well we have the numbers for that and if you are a slow reader, please don’t get discouraged.
Fast readers read at a speed of 450 words per minute. This reduces their reading time for 100 pages by almost half. They take about 1.8 hours to complete 100 pages. How does that translate to reading a book? Well they can read pretty fast. Here are the numbers.
To complete a book that is 500-pages long, a fast reader would take only about 8 hours and 35 minutes of continuous reading to complete a book. 1 hour per day of reading and the reader can complete the book in just over 8 days. They can get almost 4 books in a month. The average reader can get only 2.
My test
To make the article more precise, I wanted to do the test myself and calculate the reading speed. I read one page of a book and counted the words on that page. Then I compared my data with the general data available to see how close I was. Here are the results.
It took me 1 minute and 26 seconds to read 400 words (~390). The average speed is 1 minute 40 seconds to complete 500 words. So the average scores were pretty accurate. The book I read was Sandeep Jauhar’s Heart by Penguin Publication. If you want to do the same test, I read page number 132, the second page of chapter 8.
But here’s the shocker. The numbers changed when I picked another book. I read chapter 11, page 165 of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. The book is way more dense and the writing is complicated. So it was expected that it would take more time. It took me 2 minutes and 5 seconds to complete the page which had about 520 words. So I was a bit slower than the average time. This shows an important thing about reading speeds that everyone needs to pay attention to.
Articles you might like:
- Books by Stephen Hawking that you cannot miss.
- Top books for entrepreneurs to read.
- How to write a book review: The complete guide.
Factors affecting the speed of reading the book.
The average speed is not accurate when it comes to reading speed. Many factors affect how fast you read. You can be a fast reader, reading 500 words per minute, but your speed will decrease drastically when you read a different kind of book. the question of how long to read 100 pages is not very simple and the answers vary a lot. This is what I have found with my tests.
Depends on the book
Book genres are broadly divided into two; Fiction and non-fiction. Generally, fictional books are way more time consuming than non-fictional ones. This can be attributed to the story-building, character development, theme expression, scene description, etc. All these elements in the book require readers to slowly soak in the words and not just skim through it.
When someone reads at 400 to 500 words per minute, they are just skimming through it. This cannot be done with fictional books like Lord of the Rings or Six Crows or Jane Eyre. But even in fictional books, the rate of reading keeps changing. Some parts which are dull to read are often skimmed. Interesting portions keep up hooked.
When it comes to non-fictional books, the reading rate is relatively faster. This is due to the lack of too many elements in the story and the narrative is straight forward. So the type of book you read has a major impact on the reading speed.
Depends on the interest of the reader
Another factor that affects the reading speed is how interested the reader is. This is something you probably must have experienced if you read a lot. Some portions of the book which seem boring automatically are skimmed. Just give it a quick read so that you can move to the next part.
I remember reading A Song of Ice and Fire and waiting for Jon Snow’s chapters to come. This is also the reason why people don’t read boring books; they don’t want to soak in the content of the book. On the other hand, interesting parts get most of our attention and time. We tend to read those parts slowly, imagining everything written, and trying to experience the words. And hence, they take more time to be completed.
Depends on the author and style
The author creates the book and its content and the style is idiosyncratic to the author. Some authors are capable of making the readers hook to even tedious and uninteresting parts of the book. One example is J.R.R Tolkien. His books are full of long and detailed descriptions about the place and the people, but his writing style can keep readers hooked. I think this is a very important quality an author must strive for.
Some authors cannot put down the right pacing of the book and hence it feels all over the place. The pacing and the writing style is a big factor that comes into play when calculating the reading speed.
Depends on the practice of the reader
A factor that is obvious to all, the more you read, the better you get at it. Practice not only makes you a fast reader, but it also makes you a fast soaker. You can absorb information quickly, without sluggishly re-reading the sentences again and again.
A good practice schedule is reading for an hour and a half every day. Even if you have had a busy day, manage to read just for 15 days. The joy of completing a book encourages people to read more. Soon after a month, you’ll realize that you can read more, read better. But should you try reading faster or reading better?
Reading faster or reading better?
Reading faster is something all the beginner readers try to achieve. After all, reading faster can get more books completed. But should you focus on reading faster as opposed to reading better?
For beginners, it is advised not to take reading speed into many considerations. That can hamper your ability to understand the text and then what’s the point of reading if you are not understanding. It is better to start slow, try and learn everything you read (or imagine if you are reading fiction), and then with practice in understanding, increase your speed.
I have seen many claims where people read a hundred books in a year. Breaking that number down, it comes to 8 books per month or two books in a week. I don’t know what kind of books these guys are reading (if they are reading at all), I wouldn’t suggest that big number. You can focus on how long to read 100 pages, but not on 100 books.
What you can aim for is about 1 book in two weeks. Read it slowly and enjoy every page of it. Try and soak every sentence, the meaning behind it, and that one book will be worth 10 books. The author spent months if not years writing that book, giving it at least 2 weeks is the least we can do.
How long will it take to read these books
Let’s see how long an average reader would take to complete these books. The Lord of the Rings has over 48,000 words. So, at an average of 300 words per minute, it would take almost 27 hours of continuous reading. Read an hour a day and you’ll be done with the LotR within a month.
A Song of Ice and Fire (A Game of Thrones) has about 1.7 million words, disseminated in five books. At average reading speed, it would take 98 hours to complete it, or 98 days to complete at an hour per day.
The longest book in the English language is A Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. The book is a whopping 9.6 million words heavy. So to complete the book in average speed, you’ll need over 530 hours to complete it. An hour a day would need almost 2 years to complete the book.
So this was all about reading speed and how long you would take to complete some books. I hope you got an idea of how long to read 100 pages. Capitalize my title did a great breakdown of the time taken to read words and pages. You should also check that out.
