EPUB Reading Time
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Page counts lie: a 400-page textbook and a 400-page novel are not the same evening. Drop the EPUB in and get the actual word count, a paperback-page equivalent, and how long it takes at three reading speeds — plus which chapter is the long one.
Drop an EPUB here
The book is read in your browser and never leaves your device — no upload, no server, nothing stored.
Planning a reading load
Words, not pages. A page holds anywhere from 200 to 600 words depending on trim size, type and margins, and an EPUB reflows anyway. Word count is the only figure that compares one book with another.
Assigned reading at 238 wpm is optimistic. That rate is for reading for comprehension without stopping. Studying — highlighting, re-reading, taking notes — runs closer to the slow figure, which is why it is shown.
The longest chapter sets the sitting. Knowing that chapter 12 is 10,000 words when the rest are 4,000 stops it from ambushing you the night before. In GemReader the progress bar shows how far through the current chapter you are as you read.
Questions
How is the reading time worked out?
Every chapter in the book's reading order is opened, its text extracted, and the words counted. The average figure uses 238 words a minute — the adult silent-reading rate for non-fiction from Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies. Slow (150) and fast (350) bracket the middle two-thirds of readers.
Why does my count differ from the publisher's?
Publishers often quote a manuscript count that excludes front matter, notes and back matter; this counts everything in the spine except navigation. Expect the two to differ by a few percent, more for a heavily annotated edition.
What about Chinese, Japanese or Korean books?
Those scripts do not separate words with spaces, so characters are counted instead and converted at 2.4 characters to a word-equivalent — about 500 characters a minute at the average pace. The character count is shown separately.
How many pages is that?
The page figure divides the word count by 275, a typical mass-market paperback page. A large-print edition has fewer words a page and a dense academic one more, so treat it as a comparison figure rather than a physical count.
Does it work on PDFs?
Not yet. A PDF has no reading order or chapter structure to count, and extracting its text reliably means rendering it. The DRM checker will at least tell you whether a PDF has a text layer at all.