How long does it take to read The Midnight Library?
by Matt Haig
5h 17m
79,200 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 11 days.
That is 11 sessions with The Midnight Library.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 8 days.
How we worked this out
The Midnight Library is about 79,200 words, estimated from its 288 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 5 hours 17 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 The Midnight Library, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
The Midnight Library at a glance
- Pages
- 288
- Author
- Matt Haig
- Genre
- Literary Fiction
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read The Midnight Library alongside each other, one session at a time.
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