
How long does it take to read Outliers: The Story of Success?
by Malcolm Gladwell
Checked July 2026
5h 40m
84,975 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 12 days.
That is 11 sessions with Outliers: The Story of Success.
Read it with the Guild45 minutes a day would finish it in about 8 days.
How many words is Outliers: The Story of Success?
Outliers: The Story of Success is about 84,975 words, estimated from its 309 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 5 hours 40 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 Outliers: The Story of Success, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
How many pages is Outliers: The Story of Success?
- Pages
- 309
- Author
- Malcolm Gladwell
- Genre
- non-fiction
Read it with the Guild
Read Outliers: The Story of Success at a fire.
ReadersGuild opens soon. You have the hours. The hard part is sitting down for them. Open a fire and up to twenty readers sit with you, each with their own book, and nobody has to remember to log it afterwards.

“I built this once before. People kept their books in it, their sessions, their whole year, and I shut it down. This is me building it again properly, and everyone who was on the first one comes back as an Elder.”
One person, in San Francisco. iOS first, Android on the way.
More non-fiction
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- Seven Habits of Highly Effective People6h 45m
- In Cold Blood6h 17m
- Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything5h 52m
- The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America8h 12m
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference5h 31m