How long does it take to read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings?

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is about 67,650 words, estimated from its 246 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 4 hours 31 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 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.