After collecting all the data for One Week Of The Guardian, I’ve been looking through the statistics. One thing that struck me was the amount of words in the news for all 6 days, Monday to Saturday. In one week, there were 182,001 words. That sounds alot to me, but I managed to read all the papers and extract all the data in about 6 days (averaging 7-8 hours a day of actually working), but how does 182,000 compare to the average book?
From what I’ve found out, the average book length is about 80,000 words, at 250 words to a page, that’s about 320 pages, or about 2.3x less than the amount of words in a weeks worth of the Guardian newspaper.
So for every week that passes, you can either read the newspaper everyday, or replace the newspaper for a book. Two books infact, lots of short stories, or one huge big novel. You’ll have to decide what’s more important; updated news, or some classic stories.
How long will it take me to read the average book?
I guess that just depends on how fast you read. Luckily, the internet being the internet, you can take a 60 second test to find out just that. Then take your average reading speed, divide it by the average number of words in a book (or if you have a specific book you want to find out, multiply the number of pages by 250 to find the average wordcount) then divide it by 60 to convert the total into hours, and that’s how long it takes for you to read a book (minus distractions, making a brew, looking up words you don’t understand, slaying vampires, etc., etc.).
Incase anyone’s interested, I seem to read at about 350 words per minute. (Although I’ve been reading Band Of Brothers for about 3 years… I’m savouring it!)
