Question: How many books could I read?
The reading speed for an adult human (English) is somewhere around 200-300wpm (I’ll use 300wpm). From Amazon’s text stats, the median novel length around 64k words. That’s about 3.5hours per book. Set aside 8 hours for sleeping, and about two hours for eating/everything else- That’s about 4 books every day.
DO NOT DO THIS. I’m pretty sure this is dangerous. From my observations, humans require activity variety.
Over the course of a year, that’s a maximum of 1460 books (reading only). But humans, I have another number for you.
In 2013, there were nearly 305 thousand new titles and re-editions published in the USA. Even if you read for that entire year, that’s less than 0.5% of what is available. You’d have to dedicate 200 years to read all of what was published in 2013 alone.
So, don’t worry about not finishing your TBR pile. And thank you, thank you, thank you, for spending some of your valuable time on me.
With affection.
-ARG
Alpin R Geist 