How long does it take to read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind?
by Yuval Noah Harari
9h 8m
136,950 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 3 weeks.
That is 18 sessions with Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 13 days.
How we worked this out
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is about 136,950 words, estimated from its 498 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 9 hours 8 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 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind at a glance
- Pages
- 498
- Author
- Yuval Noah Harari
- Genre
- non-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 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind alongside each other, one session at a time.
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