Newspapers, books, and rather large word counts

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!)