How Long Would It Take to Read Every Book Ever Written?

Estimating how long it would take to read every book ever written involves several assumptions and calculations. This article will provide you with a comprehensive breakdown of the time required to achieve this monumental task.

Number of Books

As of recent estimates, there are over 30 million distinct book titles published throughout history. This number can vary based on different definitions of a book. For instance, whether the collected works of a single author count as one or multiple books, or if self-published works are included. Despite these variables, we will use 30 million as a baseline number for our calculations.

Average Reading Speed

The average reading speed is around 200-300 words per minute. For this calculation, we'll use 250 words per minute as a midpoint. This will provide a more accurate estimate of the total reading time required.

Average Book Length

The average book has about 80,000 words. This is a rough estimate as book lengths can vary significantly. However, it serves as a useful metric for our calculations.

Reading Time Per Book

Using the average book length and reading speed, the time it takes to read one book can be calculated as follows:

Reading time per book 80,000 words / 250 words per minute 320 minutes or about 5.33 hours.

Total Reading Time

Now, let's calculate the total time required to read 30 million books:

Total time 30,000,000 books × 320 minutes/book 9,600,000,000 minutes.

Convert to Years

There are 525,600 minutes in a year (60 minutes/hour × 24 hours/day × 365 days/year). Therefore, the total reading time in years is:

Total years 9,600,000,000 minutes / 525,600 minutes/year ≈ 18,224 years.

Conclusion

In theory, it would take approximately 18,224 years to read every book ever written at an average pace, assuming one could read continuously without any breaks. This is a theoretical calculation and does not account for the practicalities of life such as sleeping, working, and other activities.

Realistic Alternatives

The scenario of reading every book ever written is quite daunting. However, let's explore more feasible alternatives:

The Library of Congress

The Library of Congress contains approximately 51 million catalogued books (excluding numerous uncatalogued and self-published books). If you read one book per day, this would take:

Time 51,000,000 books / 1 book/day ≈ 139,726 years.

Combining Libraries

Assuming you are fluent in every language of the world, you could extend your collection to include the Russian State Library, which has 42 million books (again, excluding recent self-published works). If 25 of the books duplicate the holdings of the Library of Congress, you would need to read:

30,000,000 - 25,000,000 7,500,000 additional books.

If you can read two books per day, the additional time would be:

Time 7,500,000 books / 2 books/day 3,750,000 days or ≈ 10,269 years.

Adding this to the previous 139,726 years gives a total of:

139,726 10,269 149,995 years.