Blog · 2026-09-14
How fast do I really read?
Four months of tracked reading sessions. A real average pages per minute.
The raw data
I run Lecturameter, my own app, of course. Between May and September of this year I tracked 64 reading sessions with the app. Every session logs the pages I read, the minutes it took me and the book.
Here's the data:
What breaks the average
People who don't track their readings might think that the average speed is mostly stable, but it's not. There are multiple variables: the language you're reading in, font size, physical vs digital format, how dense the prose is, how familiar you are with the subject, even the day of the week or the hour within the day.
Saturday sessions are almost twice as fast as Sunday sessions. The data does not tell you why, but it tells the story on "how fast I read", which is because I was reading in a park with no distractions.
Book by book
The pace also changes with the book, like I said before. Let's go through the data:
Same reader. 5x difference. One is dense fantasy prose. The other is a manga. Any average that mixes those two is a fiction that hides more than it explains, that's why every book and genre has its own stats, because a global stat can "lie".
The takeaway
If you want to know how fast you read, do not read a paragraph and multiply. Time an actual session with an actual book. Do it a few times. Look at the individual numbers and then look the average, that way you'll have the bigger picture.
If you own an Android phone, Lecturameter does this for you. If you do not, a stopwatch and a notebook do the same job. The tool matters less than the habit of timing yourself honestly. (and if you have an iPhone you'll soon be able to try Lecturameter!)
The reading timer, the pace calculation and the daily and weekly breakdowns are the core of Lecturameter. It is free, it is Android and it does not need an account. You can take a look here.
Try it on Android
See also: Fantasy vs manga reading pace · Reading time or pages · Reading Timer