How long will it take you to finish a book at your pace?

Work it out

How does the calculator work?

It multiplies the pages you read a day by the days you read a week to get a weekly pace, then divides the book's pages by that pace. Books a year is 52 weeks of that pace divided by the book's length, rounded down. In finish-by mode it counts your reading days between today and the date and divides the pages by them.

The default example, a 400-page book at 20 pages a day on 5 days a week, comes to 100 pages a week: about 4 weeks for the book and about 13 books of that length a year.

What pace should you put in?

Your real one, not your best one. If you are not sure, read normally for a week and count pages. A reading timer helps: Bookly works out reading speed from its timer, and Basmo times sessions. Pages vary a lot between books, so treat the result as a range, not a promise.

What about audiobooks?

Use hours instead of pages: enter the book's length in hours as the pages, and the hours you listen a day as the pages per day. The arithmetic is the same.

How do you use this for a reading goal?

Set a yearly goal from your real pace, not the other way round. If the calculator says you would read 13 books of 400 pages at your current pace, a goal of 15 is a stretch and a goal of 40 is a wish. The reading goals lesson covers choosing a unit, and the short sessions lesson shows how small daily sessions add up.

How do you measure your own pace?

Time one ordinary session. Note the page when you start, read for 20 minutes at your normal speed, and note the page again. Multiply the pages by three for pages an hour. Do this with two or three different books, because pace varies with the type of book: dense non-fiction and fantasy with invented names read slower than familiar genre fiction.

Use the slower figure for planning. A plan built on your best evening will run late; a plan built on an ordinary one usually finishes.

How do you plan a library loan with it?

A worked example. A 21-day ebook loan of a 420-page book is 20 pages a day. At 30 pages an hour that is 40 minutes a day, which may be more than your weeks hold. Two options: start the loan only when you have that time, or plan to renew and re-borrow. The calculator gives you the daily number before you start, not after you fall behind.

Does pace change through a book?

Often. The first fifty pages of a novel are usually slower, while you learn the names and the world, and the last third is often faster. Plan with your ordinary pace, then expect to fall a little behind early and catch up later.

How do you plan a whole series with it?

Add up the pages of the books you plan to read, then divide by your daily pages. A worked example: three books of 400, 450 and 500 pages make 1,350 pages. At 30 pages a day that is 45 days, or about six and a half weeks, before any days off.

Add a few days between books for the pause most readers take, and if a new book in the series has a release date, count back from it to find your start date.

What if the book is taking much longer than the sum?

That usually means the book is not working for you, or life got busy. Both are fine. If it is the book, letting it go is a reasonable choice; Goodreads and The StoryGraph both have did-not-finish markers. If it is life, keep a note of where you stopped so the story is still there when you come back.