How long does it take to read Fifty Shades of Grey?
by E.L. James
6h 32m
97,900 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 2 weeks.
That is 13 sessions with Fifty Shades of Grey.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 9 days.
How we worked this out
Fifty Shades of Grey is about 97,900 words, estimated from its 356 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 6 hours 32 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 Fifty Shades of Grey, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Fifty Shades of Grey at a glance
- Pages
- 356
- Author
- E.L. James
- Series
- Fifty Shades, book 1
- 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 Fifty Shades of Grey alongside each other, one session at a time.
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