How long does it take to read 300 pages?
The standard novel. When someone pictures a book without thinking about it, this is the length they are picturing.
5h 30m
82,500 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 11 days.
That is 11 sessions with 300 pages.
Read it with the Guild45 minutes a day would finish it in about 8 days.
How many words is 300 pages?
300 pages is about 82,500 words, at the trade-paperback average of 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 5 hours 30 minutes.
Most reading-time sites default to 300 words a minute. The best evidence we could find, a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert, puts silent adult reading of English prose closer to 238 words a minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. We use 250. It is slower than the number you will see elsewhere, and it is closer to how people actually read.
Page counts are the softer half of this. Font size, trim size and how much of a book is dialogue all move words-per-page around, so a 300-page hardback and a 300-page mass-market paperback are not the same read. Treat this as a good estimate, not a count.
- Slower (150 wpm)
- 9 hours 10 minutes
- Average (250 wpm)
- 5 hours 30 minutes
- Faster (400 wpm)
- 3 hours 26 minutes
What 300 pages a day gets you
300 pages a day is about 5 hours 30 minutes of reading. Keep it up and an average 300-page novel takes 1 day. Here is what that looks like against books people are actually timing.
Books that are about 300 pages
From our catalog, between 270 and 330 pages.
Knowing the number is the easy part.
300 pages a day is a plan. Keeping it is the hard part, and it is easier with company. ReadersGuild opens soon, and it is where people read alongside each other, one session at a time.
Join the waitlist