A Book's Worth of Time

How many books
can you read
in a lifetime?

Measure your reading speed and count the time you have left. Then, faced with that number, choose which books to read from nothing but their first lines.

First, your reading speed

Read the way you normally read a book, and press the button when you finish.

Tell me about your time

Your speed: words/min (a book is assumed to be about 80,000 words)

Age Daily reading time Your pile of unread books

To age 85, if your speed and habits stay as they are

books

That is how many books you can read in your life.

There are endless books in the world, and this is all you can read.
So which books will you read? Let's choose by first line.

Taste picks

Pick the books you really love

These are the 731 works on the Literature Map plus 56 widely read books. Narrow them with the buttons below and tap the books you love. Pick up to 10; three or more gets you recommendations.

My Reading Taste

What to read next

Picks are scored by how similar they are to your books in author region, era, genre and setting. It is no guarantee you will love them, and it only recommends works listed on the Literature Map.

Results

Once you've chosen a book, go where it lives
Beautiful Spaces of the World (library and museum map) · Literature Map

Your reading speed is a rough figure from one short passage. We count a book as 80,000 words and life expectancy as 85. First lines are only those checked against public-domain texts on Project Gutenberg (the quiz is English-edition only; the Korean edition also has Korean works).

About A Book's Worth of Time

What it is

"A Book's Worth of Time" works out how many books you can read in a lifetime at your reading speed, then has you choose which books to put inside that number with a first-line quiz. Books never stop coming, but the amount you can read is fixed. The page shows that as a number and gives you practice choosing in front of it.

How to use it

Measure your speed: read the opening of a classic novel (one of nine passages from Austen, Dickens, Shelley, Stevenson, Stoker, Brontë, Twain, Wells and Doyle) and press the button when you finish. The word count divided by your reading time gives words per minute. If you press it within three seconds, the page assumes it was a mistake and has you read again. You can switch passages with "Try a different passage", and measure again on another one after the result. The result also shows how many pages of a typical book you read in an hour, and where you sit among everyone else who took the test (top what percent, and the median for your age group).

Comprehension check: after the speed test you get two questions on the passage you just read (you can calculate without answering). If both answers are wrong, the reading is treated as a skim and that speed is left out of the comparison data.

Skip the test: "Skip the test, use an average speed" on the first screen calculates straight away at 230 words a minute. That figure is not added to the comparison data, and you can go and measure your own speed from the result.

Calculate: enter your age, daily reading time and the size of your unread pile. You get the number of books you can read in a lifetime, the time one book takes, books per year, and how long your pile would take to finish.

First-line quiz: ten questions. You see only the sentence and pick the book from four choices. After each answer you get the author, year, original title and a link to the full text, plus a Literature Map link for books with a place on that map. Add the books you like to your reading list.

Taste picks: choose up to ten books you really love (three or more is enough). Narrow the list by region, era and genre, and search by title or author inside it. Each recommended book shows how many hours it takes at your speed and how many days at your daily reading time. You get a reading-taste name, the distribution of regions, eras and genres, and ten books to read next (up to 30 with "Show more"). Each pick has a reason, such as "You picked 6 books by Eastern European authors", and links to the Literature Map. The taste card can be saved as an image or shared.

My shelf: log the books you have read, then star your favorites and they line up on a one-row shelf, in order (up to 24). Tap a book to move or remove it. Choose from the 731 works on the Literature Map, or search by title or author to find more in Open Library and Wikidata (the text you type is sent to those two sites). A book you add gets today as its date read, and you can change the date by tapping the book. Above the shelf you see how many books you have read this year, progress toward a yearly goal, a bar for each month, and which book of your lifetime total you are on. Signed in, your shelf and goals are saved to your account; signed out, they stay on this device.

Results: your score, and how many books you picked out of your lifetime total. The result text can be copied or shared.

Result links and racing a friend: sharing from the calculation or quiz result creates a link holding your lifetime count, speed and the passage you read. The link preview shows your lifetime count (rounded to a range), and whoever opens it can take the test on the same passage and compare. The link carries no name or other personal details.

Reading plan: line up the books you want to read and your speed (230 words a minute until you take the test) and daily reading time show when you will finish each book and the whole list. Set a target date to see how many minutes a day you need. Books not on the Literature Map can be added by title and page count (275 words a page).

Reading timer: times your reading. The start time is stored on the device, so it keeps running if you close the page. When you stop, enter the pages you read to see time read today, over the last 7 days and in all, and your pages an hour from your own log (sessions over a minute only). For Literature Map works, "I finished this book" logs it on your shelf.

Which book is longer?: a game showing two of the 351 classics with known page counts; pick the longer one. Pairs within 15% of each other are never shown. One wrong answer ends the run, and your best streak is kept.

Reading notes: tap a book on My shelf to write a one-line take and a line you want to remember.

Where it is stored: the reading plan, timer log, game best and notes stay in this browser only and are not synced to your account.

Year card: from My shelf, turn this year's count, goal progress, monthly bars and this year's favorites into one image to save or share.

Sources and method

The English edition has 81 first lines: 66 from books in English (including English translations of Russian, Spanish and German works), 11 in French, 2 in German and 2 in Italian. All are taken from Project Gutenberg texts. Candidate sentences were written first and then checked against the book text by string matching, and only those that passed are included. The reading passages are paragraphs copied straight from the same texts.

Reading speed: measured on one passage of 90 to 150 words, so it is a rough figure that varies with the text. Measuring on several passages is more reliable. Anything under 60 words per minute counts as 60, and there is no upper limit for fast readers.

Length of a book: the lifetime count assumes 80,000 words a book. Real books vary, so your actual count will differ.

Time for each book: page counts for Literature Map works are the median page count of editions listed in Open Library, at 275 words a page. 351 works have a page count; the rest use a default by genre (poems 400 words, short stories 8,000, novels 80,000). Before you measure, 230 words a minute is used.

Pages an hour: counted at 275 words to a typical page.

Compared with others: when you press Calculate, your newly measured speed and age group (by decade) are stored anonymously, with no account, IP address or other identifier. Values that look like a mis-measurement (under 50 or over 1,000 words a minute) are neither stored nor counted. The chart appears only once 30 results are in, and an age group's median only when that group has 30 or more.

Lifetime: assumes your current speed and reading time hold until age 85.

So far: it also estimates how many books you would have read from age 7 to now at the same speed and reading time. Your speed and time were surely different as a child, so treat it as a rough figure for fun.

How picks are scored: from the metadata of the 731 works on the Literature Map (liter.ghmun.com). The same author scores highest, followed by overlap in author region, era (before 1850, late 19th century, early 20th century, late 20th century, 21st century), genre and the country where the work is set. At most two books per author are recommended. Everything is computed on this page, with no server and no AI.

Literature Map links: attached only to the 27 works whose titles match and have a place on the map.

Titles and author names: English titles and names are the ones recorded on the Literature Map. Where a work has no established English title, a literal translation is used, so some may differ from the title you know.

Limits and cautions

Picks come only from the works on the Literature Map, so recent bestsellers and genre fiction can be neither chosen nor recommended. The score measures similarity and does not mean you will love a book. With only 81 first lines in the quiz, questions can repeat. First lines differ between editions and translations, so a sentence may not match the edition on your shelf. Works still under copyright are not included. The comparison covers only people who took the test here, so it does not represent the whole population, and one person may appear more than once. Reading time per book can vary a lot by edition. The calculation is a rough figure for fun, not a measure of how much you read.

How many bookscan you readin a lifetime?