The SRS Reading Time Calculator

Q: How long does it take to read a book?

A: That depends on three things: the length of the book, how many words sit on each page, and how fast you read. Enter those and the calculator turns them into a single figure — the total time to finish at your current speed. A 300-page book at 200 words a minute works out to roughly nine hours. The point isn't the hours; it's that "too long" becomes a number you can plan around.

Q: What reading speed should I enter — and what's average?

A: Enter your real words per minute, not a guess — the whole estimate rests on it. If you don't know it, take the quick test first; it takes about a minute and gives you a figure to work from. The calculator defaults to 200 words a minute as a sensible starting point, but your own number is what makes every result on this page accurate to you rather than to an average.

Q: How long does it take to read 100 pages?

A: That depends on the words on each page and your reading speed, but the calculator gives you the exact figure. As a rough anchor: 100 pages at the default 350 words a page is 35,000 words — about three hours at 200 words a minute, or under two at 350. Enter your own page count and speed for the real number, then use the milestone target to break it into a short daily push.

Q: How much should I read each day?

A: Pick the daily reading time you can genuinely keep, with your phone out of reach — be honest, because the plan is only as good as the time you actually protect. The calculator takes that number and tells you how many days the book will take at your pace. Fifteen or twenty steady minutes a day, kept consistently, finishes far more books than the long session you keep meaning to schedule and never quite do.

Q: How many books can I read in a year?

A: Read the note at the bottom of your result — it works that out for you. It converts your daily minutes and current speed into roughly how many full-length books you'd finish in a year. Then it shows two levers: fifteen more minutes a day, and a modest lift in speed on top. Most readers are surprised how fast the yearly number climbs once both move together. That's usually the moment the skill starts to feel worth training.

Q: Does reading faster actually make a difference?

A: Yes — but not in the way racing suggests. An extra fifty or a hundred words a minute looks small on its own. Spread across every book you read in a year, it compounds into a real difference in how much you finish — and the calculator shows that in books, not percentages. Reading faster isn't about rushing; it's about what a steady, trained increase does to a whole year of reading.

Q: Why do I tell my students to read a novel in just 2–3 days?

A: Because most people badly overestimate how long a book really takes them. They read too slowly, lose focus and interest early on, and so a single book drags out over a week, two weeks, sometimes a month. I ask them to think about how they watch a movie. Imagine approaching a movie the way you approach that book — ten minutes today, fifteen tomorrow, twelve the day after, and so on across a week. On what day would you have to rewind to the start, just to remember how it began? You'd never watch a movie that way. You know it runs two or three hours, so you watch it in one go. A novel is the same. When you can really read fiction — at a minimum of 400 words a minute, and ideally closer to 600 — a 200-to-300-page book takes you about two to three hours, the length of a movie. That's an hour a day for two or three days. You never lose the thread, you never have to backtrack, your interest holds the whole way through, and you enjoy the book far more. And you've still got three or four days left in the week to start and finish another one. Simple.

If you're nowhere near 400 words a minute yet, that's normal — almost no one is, because no one ever taught us how. It's a skill you build, not a talent you're born with, and ten days of the right drill is enough to feel the difference. That's exactly what's in the $47 Starter Kit: one exercise, a novel you already know, and a re-test at the end so you measure the change yourself rather than take my word for it.