How long does it take to read Dear John?
by Nicholas Sparks
5h 4m
75,900 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 11 days.
That is 10 sessions with Dear John.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 7 days.
How we worked this out
Dear John is about 75,900 words, estimated from its 276 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 5 hours 4 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.
This is still a model, not a measurement. When enough ReadersGuild readers have finished Dear John, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Dear John at a glance
- Pages
- 276
- Author
- Nicholas Sparks
- Genre
- romance
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read Dear John alongside each other, one session at a time.
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