How much can you read in a year?

May 17, 2020readinghabitsdynamic content

If we read 30 minutes every single day (which is optimistic), how much could we read over the course of a week / month / year / 10 years? In Tim Urban’s post [1], he breaks down our days into blocks, which forces us to think about how we spend each block. Reading is not something we have time for, but a choice that we make every day.

Even a tiny bit here and there could amount to a huge amount of books over years. Incrementally gaining and retaining information is the secret to the enormous breadth of knowledge of individuals like Oprah, Bill Gates, and Hermione. Here's a reading calculator that approximates out how much you can read, given your reading habits.

If you read 200 words per minute and read for 30 minutes per day, then in
you can read all of:
  • 656 tweets,
  • 32 short blog posts,
  • 3.6 long blog posts or magazine articles, and  
  • 1.0 books

Or in pictures..

tweets
blogs
long blogs
books
1
1
1
1
1
10
10
10
10
10
100
100
100
100
100
100
1
1
10
10
10
1
1
1
1

Even if the numbers aren't what you want, the great news is that a choice to start reading today and onwards will have an impact for years!

The Numbers

The average adult reads from 200-250 words per minute. A tweet could have 280 characters, although the average tweet is much less. Here we'll assume a tweet has 140 characters with the average of 5.1 characters per word.

Small blog posts are around 1000 words, and long blog posts like Gwern, SlateStarCodex, and Longreads could be an order of magnitude larger at 10,000 words. The same goes for magazine articles like the New Yorker.

Books are different! Literary fiction could be from 55,000 to 100,000 words (To Kill a Mockingbird has 99,121). Long novels like Ulyssess and Infinite Jest have 265,222 and 577,608 words respectively. We've set the average here to 90,000.

[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/10/100-blocks-day.html

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