How many books do you read a year?

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

If those figures are accurate, it does sound as if you're a slow reader (and that's absolutely not a bad thing, let me hasten to add!). 2.5h a day is 17.5h a week. If we consider that an average novel can be read out loud (ie as an audiobook) in about 10h,

Really? For example Enders Game is 350 pages and the audio book is 12 hours. 10 hours would be around 300 pages and that is very short and not at all an average novel.

[Apache]

I own my own business. If I read at work it must be OK with the boss.
Apache

[silverraven]

Honestly, I know how I read so many books so quickly. I read nothing that requires my brain to actually engage more than at just a cursory level. I read things like Sue Grafton, Patricia Cornwell, Lorna Barrett, Kathy Reichs, Alex Kava, Erin Hart, etc. Pure escapism. Plus a lot of them are short books.
I can guarantee that if I were reading anything that I had to actually think about as I was reading it would take me longer to read a book. Every now and then I'll throw in something that requires more than two brain cells. When I read In the Garden of Beasts by Eric Larson I know it took me two weeks to read that. It was a great book, but not what I want right now. Maybe next year.....
Maybe we should split the poll into books that take a brain vs. books that don't??
S

[NickyWithNook]

I have chronic migraine headaches and can't read as much as I might like to. Maybe 25 to 30? Maybe not quite that many. I'm not sure. I don't really keep track.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

Most of the readers I know and have known, read at least a book a week, usually more. The average American watches 2.8 hours of TV per day (source), and it's reasonable to expect that a person who lists reading as their primary leisure activity would devote a similar amount of time to it. That's just about 20 hours a week, which according to the 10 hour audiobook scale, would easily translate to 2 books a week.

I question using that as a scale. I don't think I know anybody who reads print/ebooks anywhere near as slowly as an audiobook narrates it.

[BelleZora]

Originally Posted by silverraven

Maybe we should split the poll into books that take a brain vs. books that don't??

I read genre fiction quickly. But some few books require weeks or even months such as Ovid's Metamorphoses or John Hemming's Conquest of the Incas. I'm still mulling over The Satanic Verses. That is why I'm often reading at least a couple of books concurrently: always one for the pure joy of the story and one that I am trying to understand by applying skills learned long ago from Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book. The second, strenuous kind of reading is immensely satisfying, but tiring. The first kind is relaxing and rejuvenating. I need and love both.

I never skim through anything while reading a book. If a book contains words or pronunciation new to me, I often read along while listening to an audio book. So far this year I've read 113 books, many of them very long. I love MR because in this forum my reading habits are not unusual, but more the norm.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by meeera

I question using that as a scale. I don't think I know anybody who reads print/ebooks anywhere near as slowly as an audiobook narrates it.

That actually feeds into my point. If a regular listener can listen to two audiobooks in a week, a regular reader can easily read two or more books in the same span of time.

I'm arguing the survey is flawed because its scale ends where regular readers start. 61+ books is a better starting point than end point.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

That actually feeds into my point. If a regular listener can listen to two audiobooks in a week, a regular reader can easily read two or more books in the same span of time.

I'm arguing the survey is flawed because its scale ends where regular readers start. 61+ books is a better starting point than end point.

I'm in absolute agreement! (as the 250-by-November poster above...) Well, maybe it might be useful to some to keep some granularity below 61, but a more revealing upper point might be 300+ or 400+.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by meeera

I'm in absolute agreement! (as the 250-by-November poster above...) Well, maybe it might be useful to some to keep some granularity below 61, but a more revealing upper point might be 300+ or 400+.

Maybe a poll by month one of these days.
0-1
1-2
3-5
5-9
10-14
15-20
20-30
30+

Not that it matter in the grand scheme of life. Sometimes (very rarely) I read 2-3 books a day for a week or so at a time. Sometimes I read only one a week. I'll never read all of the books I want to read, because even if I lived forever someone is always writing another one.

Helen

[Yapyap]

I agree about the poll needing more granularity in the higher end. That would probably make it look quite a bit different - there are people who read 61 books a year and there are people who read 200 books a year.

I read, when I read for winding down after work (which is all reading, all the time, of complex things, and having to go into detail and read every word and make sure I'm absolutely certain how each sentence is put together), for the plot and the characters. I don't read for the words. I can appreciate a well-written book, but to me, when I consciously notice how a book has been written, either because it's full of grammar mistakes and typos or too "pretty" - when the words draw attention away from what is happening - then that is not a book for me, not at this particular stage in my life.

And that pretty much means I skim at times (if I find myself staring at the screen for several minutes and realise I haven't taken in any of it, I'll skip that part instead of trying harder, because there's only one reason for that and that is being bored by it), and I don't spend time going back to re-read in order to appreciate something.

Sometimes, very rarely, I go back after I've finished, to look for specific passages or quotes again, but that happens very rarely indeed.

As for ADE page counts, in my (admittedly limited, as I rarely look at page numbers in ADE - I only use it to download epub books) experience, they tend to be considerably lower than the page counts for the same books in any other edition. It's probably the most obvious with books aimed at younger readers, as paper editions tend to have slightly larger print.

Last few books I've bought as ADE ePub & checked:

Chimes at Midnight, average-length genre / urban fantasy novel - ADE page count is 319, paperback page count (according to Goodreads) is 346 and Kindle page count is apparently 368.

For Darkness Shows the Stars, average-length YA novel - ADE page count is 293, hardback page count is 402, paperback page count is 407.

Seeds of Rebellion - average-length middle grade series novel - ADE page count is 380, hardback page count is 512, paperback page count is 528.

The Luminaries, non-typical, doorstopper size Booker prize winning novel - ADE page count is 753, hardcover is 848 pages, paperback is 832 pages.

So there is a clear difference, yes. For a more "dense" novel, a hundred page difference is a good two extra hours of reading for the "average" reader (if we take ~50-60 paper book pages an hour to be the sort of speed that a regular reader who is neither particularly slow or particularly fast would manage - going by what people say here).

In other words, someone who goes by ADE page counts may say for example that they get through a 320 page book in eight hours, while someone who read the same book in paper will say that they get through a 400 page book in eight hours.

When I talk about "pages", I go by paper books as that's something most people are still reasonably familiar with - and yes, I'm aware they can differ a whole lot, so I usually go by hardcover or trade paperback pages, where there tends to be more white space and the words aren't crammed together in the tiniest font imaginable in order to save paper.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by tompe

Really? For example Enders Game is 350 pages and the audio book is 12 hours. 10 hours would be around 300 pages and that is very short and not at all an average novel.

It's a ballpark figure. A typical Agatha Christie novel is about 6h as an audiobook. Obviously it will vary with the length of the book, but I think 10h, as a rough average, is in the right sort of area.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It's a ballpark figure. A typical Agatha Christie novel is about 6h as an audiobook. Obviously it will vary with the length of the book, but I think 10h, as a rough average, is in the right sort of area.

I think it is totally wrong since an average book nowadays is more around 500-600 pages. So more like 20 hours for one book. And the listening rate is 2 minutes per page.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by tompe

I think it is totally wrong since an average book nowadays is more around 500-600 pages. So more like 20 hours for one book. And the listening rate is 2 minutes per page.

Whatever. Suit yourself.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Whatever. Suit yourself.

And the person you commented said he read mostly 500-700 page books. So it is kind of objective that a 500-700 book does not take 10 hours to listen to.

[Katsunami]

There is also one person that said "at the average reading speed of about 60 pages an hour...". IMHO, that's very fast. My average reading speed is around 35-40 pages an hour (lets assume 37), 45 if I hurry, and 50 if I need to, but then I already feel I'm running through the book. (Measurements are based on the Kindles Time To Read function.)

Well... a "page" is 2400 characters long at this time, because I set it as such in Count Pages. It's the average number of characters on a page in a Del Rey paperback. (I have a lot of them to make sure ) The average length of a word is assumed to be 5 characters (1).

2400 / 5 = 480 words per page.
37 pages per hour = 17660 words / hour, or 295 words/min.

The average reading speed is assumed to be 250 WPM (2), so I'm already 20% faster than average, and I have close to 100% comprehension. 60 pages per hour would be like reading 480 WPM, which I find to be a lot faster than average.

At my speed of reading 37 pages an hour, a 370 page book would cost me 10 hours.

If someone would make an audiobook that also takes 10 hours, they'd need to speak at 300 WPM, which is 5 words per second. I think that this is quite fast for narrating a story. I've never listened to an audiobook, but I know that I don't speak at 300 WPM, let alone that I would narrate a story at that speed.

(1) http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i...sh+word+length
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading
"While the average adult reading rate is 250 words per minute with 70% comprehension..."