Cover of The Metamorphosis
Reading time

How long does it take to read The Metamorphosis?

by Franz Kafka

At an average pace

3h 41m

55,275 words at 250 a minute

At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 8 days.

That is 7 sessions with The Metamorphosis.

How fast do you read?
30

45 minutes a day would finish it in about 5 days.

How we worked this out

The Metamorphosis is about 55,275 words, estimated from its 201 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 3 hours 41 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 The Metamorphosis, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.

The Metamorphosis at a glance

Pages
201
Author
Franz Kafka
Genre
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 The Metamorphosis alongside each other, one session at a time.

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