How long does it take to read Dune?
by Frank Herbert
9h 49m
147,125 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 3 weeks.
That is 20 sessions with Dune.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 2 weeks.
How we worked this out
Dune is about 147,125 words, estimated from its 535 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 9 hours 49 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 Dune, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Dune at a glance
- Pages
- 535
- Author
- Frank Herbert
- Genre
- Science Fiction
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read Dune alongside each other, one session at a time.
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