How long does it take to read A Short History of Nearly Everything?
by Bill Bryson
Checked July 2026
9h 58m
149,600 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 3 weeks.
That is 20 sessions with A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Read it with the Guild45 minutes a day would finish it in about 2 weeks.
How many words is A Short History of Nearly Everything?
A Short History of Nearly Everything is about 149,600 words, estimated from its 544 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 9 hours 58 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 A Short History of Nearly Everything, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
How many pages is A Short History of Nearly Everything?
- Pages
- 544
- Author
- Bill Bryson
- Genre
- history, historical fiction, biography
Read it with the Guild
Read A Short History of Nearly Everything 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.