Studies

Questions about books, answered from what ReadingRate measures: the words in each book whose text we hold, the page counts of its editions, the prizes it won. Each study gives its finding first, then how it was measured, what it cannot tell you, and the data to check it.

• How many words are on a page?

  A printed page of a book holds about 300 words. We counted the words in 1,989 books whose full text ReadingRate holds and set each against the page counts of its print editions: half of the books hold between 250 and 347 words a page, one in ten fewer than 203 and one in ten more than 402. So a 300-page book runs from about 64,000 to 111,000 words, which at an average 250 words a minute is 4.3 to 7.4 hours.

  A ReadingRate study · 1,989 books · 20,167 print editions · measured 10 November 2026

Every number has its count of books beside it. Where a study uses a model or an estimate, it says so; where it does not, it says that too. The data is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.