How long does it take to read Paper Towns?
by John Green
5h 36m
83,875 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 12 days.
That is 11 sessions with Paper Towns.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 8 days.
How we worked this out
Paper Towns is about 83,875 words, estimated from its 305 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 5 hours 36 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 Paper Towns, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Paper Towns at a glance
- Pages
- 305
- Author
- John Green
- Genre
- young-adult
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read Paper Towns alongside each other, one session at a time.
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