How long does it take to read Steve Jobs?
by Walter Isaacson
12h 2m
180,400 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 4 weeks.
That is 24 sessions with Steve Jobs.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 2 weeks.
How we worked this out
Steve Jobs is about 180,400 words, estimated from its 656 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 12 hours 2 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 Steve Jobs, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Steve Jobs at a glance
- Pages
- 656
- Author
- Walter Isaacson
- Genre
- history, historical fiction, biography
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read Steve Jobs alongside each other, one session at a time.
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