Audiobook length calculator

Estimate from

Word countPage countLibrary title

Word count

Narration pace (155 words per minute)

Typical audiobook narration is about 150–160 words per minute.

Playback speed

0.75x1x1.25x1.5x1.75x2x

Silent reading pace

Non-fiction (238 wpm)Fiction (260 wpm)

Minutes a day

About 9 h 40 m at 1x

90,000 words · ≈ 19 days at 30 minutes a day.

Listening time at each playback speed

Speed	Listening time
0.75x	About 12 h 55 m
1x	About 9 h 40 m
1.25x	About 7 h 45 m
1.5x	About 6 h 25 m
1.75x	About 5 h 30 m
2x	About 4 h 50 m

Reading it silently would take about 6 h 20 m.

Have this book as an EPUB you own that isn't copy-protected? Listen to it in CocoReader.

How long is an audiobook?

A 90,000-word novel is about 9 h 40 m at 1x, using 155 words per minute. These three titles from the CocoReader library use approximate catalog word counts, rounded to the nearest thousand:

Classics here are examples only. Word counts are approximate catalog figures, rounded to the nearest thousand. Editions differ, and a narrator's pace is not always 155 words per minute.

How the calculator works

Listening minutes = words ÷ (narration words per minute × playback speed). Reading minutes = words ÷ silent-reading words per minute. Times above one hour are rounded to the nearest five minutes.

The default narration pace is 155 words per minute, from ACX's estimate that about 9,300 words equals one hour of finished audio (Money Talks, ACX, 11 June 2013). Silent reading defaults to 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction, from Brysbaert (2019), How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate, Journal of Memory and Language 109.

Have an EPUB you own? Here is how to listen to an EPUB on iPhone.