Short answer: an average novel of about 300 pages represents 5 to 7 hours of reading for an adult reader at normal speed. At a pace of 30 minutes a day, that means ten days to two weeks per book. But this figure varies enormously with the book's length, its difficulty and your speed: here are the detailed numbers.
Average reading speed, in numbers
An adult reader averages between 200 and 300 words per minute on ordinary text, with good comprehension. A standard book page contains roughly 250 to 300 words. The math is therefore simple and easy to remember: at average speed, you read about one page per minute, or 40 to 60 pages per hour.
The difficulty of the text changes everything: a thriller flies by at 300 words per minute, while a dense philosophy essay or a technical book can drop below 150, because you reread, pause and take notes. The figures that follow apply to a book of normal difficulty.
The table: reading time by book length
Based on one page per minute, here is the total reading time, and the number of days needed depending on your daily routine.
| Book length | Total time | At 15 min/day | At 30 min/day | At 1 h/day |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 150 pages (short essay) | 2h 30m | 10 days | 5 days | 3 days |
| 250 pages (short novel) | 4h 10m | 17 days | 9 days | 5 days |
| 300 pages (average novel) | 5h 00m | 20 days | 10 days | 5 days |
| 400 pages (long novel) | 6h 40m | 27 days | 14 days | 7 days |
| 600 pages (doorstopper) | 10h 00m | 40 days | 20 days | 10 days |
Two lessons jump out. First, no book is truly long: even a 600-page doorstopper fits into three weeks at 30 minutes a day. Second, consistency crushes speed: 20 minutes every day beats a heroic three-hour session one Sunday a month.
At the actual pace of French readers
According to the CNL/Ipsos 2025 barometer, French readers read an average of 31 minutes per day, about 3h 40m per week. At that pace, a 300-page novel is finished in about ten days, and the year adds up to roughly 190 hours of reading: enough in theory to read about thirty average books, whereas the actual average is 18 books per year. The gap has a simple explanation: declared time is not always continuous reading time. All the figures are in our dedicated article https://www.cobaltapp.io/fr/blog/combien-de-livres-lisent-les-francais.
Can you read faster without losing anything?
A little, but not as much as speed-reading promises would have you believe. Two gains are real and within reach: eliminating regressions (going back out of habit, not out of need) and adapting your speed to the passage, accelerating through transitions and slowing down on dense ideas. Spectacular speeds (1,000 words per minute and more), on the other hand, are always paid for in comprehension. We devoted a full article to this debate: reading fast or reading slowly https://www.cobaltapp.io/fr/blog/lire-vite-ou-lire-lentement.
The best optimization lies elsewhere: choosing better books. Abandoning, without guilt, a book that brings nothing frees up dozens of hours a year for the ones that matter.
And when you really have no time?
Two levers remain. The first: reclaiming time that already exists. Commutes, waiting times and the last scroll of the evening often add up to more than 30 minutes a day; our concrete solutions are here https://www.cobaltapp.io/fr/blog/manque-de-temps-pour-lire-solutions.
The second: turning to summaries for non-fiction books. A structured 8-minute summary delivers the key ideas of a 5-hour book, which lets you decide which ones deserve a full read, and retain the essentials of those you will never finish. That is exactly what Cobalt offers: more than 40 books summarized down to the essentials at https://www.cobaltapp.io/fr/resumes, to take everywhere with the app https://www.cobaltapp.io/download.
The takeaway
An average book is 5 hours, not a mountain. At 30 minutes a day, you read 15 to 20 books a year; at one summary a day, you explore the ideas of 300 books. Between the two, everyone sets their own cursor: what matters is not speed, it is starting tonight.