The average reading speed of an adult is 200 to 250 words per minute with a high comprehension rate (70-80%). Readers who skim, can read at about 500-800 words per minute, but comprehension drops to about 60%. At the World Championship Speed Reading Competition contestants read as fast as 1,000 to 2,000 words per minute at the expense of comprehension that drops down to 50%-40%. World champion speed reader Anne Jones of England read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows in 47 minutes at an astonishing 4,251 words per minute. Who says muggles don’t have magical powers? Harry Potter novels aside, it doesn’t make sense to speed read a great novel; it’s like gulping down a bottle of fine wine. The whole point of reading is to savor the words, the cadence and rhythm of the sentences. But we digress…
Eschewing the seemingly steroid-enhanced performance of speed readers, let us use the 200 per minute as the basis for our calculations. If one were to read the entire second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), printed in 20 volumes with 21,730 pages and containing over 59 million words, it would take a reader about 205 days (reading 24 hours a day), resulting in a very exhausted, bleary-eyed individual; albeit, one with a very expansive vocabulary. And Ammon Shea, a life-long logophile, did just that in one year and wrote a book about it (Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages).
If one were to read the entire printed edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (2002), consisting of 32 volumes, 33,000 pages, and 44 million words, it would take a reader 153 days. And yes, someone did that too. This time it was stunt journalist A. J. Jacobs who wrote about his read-a-thon titled The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (2004).
If one were to read the soporific U.S. tax code (2012) that contains more than 4 million words, it would take a reader 14 days. The surgeon general has warned that reading that amount of arcane and banal material can be deleterious to your mental health, but will certainly lower your taxes (assuming your comprehension rate stayed high).
If one were to read the King James Bible (the combined word count of the Old and New Testament is about 774,746), it would take 3 days — time worth spending if you want to explore and deepen your faith and spirituality — or lack thereof.
Moving to the more mundane, the average book is about 250 pages long, with about 500 words per page. It will take an average reader about 10.5 hours to read it.
For further reading: Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea, Perigee (2008).
The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A. J. Jacobs, Simon & Schuster (2005)
http://news.yahoo.com/us-tax-code-longer-bible-without-good-news-191208508–finance.html
http://www.mentalworldrecords.com/worldspeedreadingcouncil/index.asp
FAQs
The Britannica has a reputation for summarizing knowledge. To further their education, some people have devoted themselves to reading the entire Britannica, taking anywhere from three to 22 years to do so.
Who has read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica? ›
A.J. Jacobs was not the first to read the entire Britannica. The earliest recorded example was Fath Ali, who upon becoming the Shah of Persia in 1797, was given a gift of the 3rd edition of the Britannica.
Is Encyclopedia Britannica worth it? ›
The Encyclopedia Britannica contains carefully edited articles on all major topics. It fits the ideal purpose of a reference work as a place to get started, or to refer back to as you read and write. The articles in Britannica are written by expert authors who are both identifiable and credible.
What encyclopedia did Elon Musk read? ›
“I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents,” Musk once said in an interview with Rolling Stone. It's reported that he read the entirety of the Encyclopedia Britannica by age 9, and would continue to be engrossed in books for more than 10 hours a day throughout his childhood.
What reading level is Britannica? ›
The differentiated instruction and PreK through 12th grade Common Core content-rich, lively material make Britannica School a highly recommended database that is relevant in the digital age.
Why was encyclopedia Britannica discontinued? ›
"The print edition became more difficult to maintain and wasn't the best physical element to deliver the quality of our database and the quality of our editorial," Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., told Reuters.
Is encyclopedia Britannica better than Wikipedia? ›
Encyclopædia Britannica also argued that a breakdown of the errors indicated that the mistakes in Wikipedia were more often the inclusion of incorrect facts, while the mistakes in Britannica were "errors of omission", making "Britannica far more accurate than Wikipedia, according to the figures".
When was the 1st edition of encyclopedia Britannica? ›
The Encyclopædia Britannica was first published in 1768, when it began to appear in Edinburgh, Scotland. Since its founding, the Encyclopædia Britannica has relied upon both outside experts and its own editors with various subject-area proficiencies to write its entries.
Are old encyclopedias Britannica worth anything? ›
Unfortunately the only really collectible Britannica sets are the the 9th and 11th editions. Full sets of the 15th, like yours, are readily available from retail resellers from $150 to $200. These prices closely reflect actual completed sales of these volumes.
Can you trust Encyclopedia Britannica? ›
Britannica's content is among the most trusted in the world. Every article is written, and continually fact-checked, by our experts. Subscribe to Britannica Premium and unlock our entire database of trusted content today.
Recycling encyclopedias
Call your local library and ask if you may donate your set to be sold. Put it up for giveaway on freecycle.org. If they're really old -- say, more than 100 years -- call a rare bookseller and ask if they're worth anything. Find out if a local recycler takes them.
Is Britannica considered a reliable encyclopedia? ›
Britannica's content is among the most trusted in the world.
What is the book of hours Britannica? ›
The book of hours began to appear in the 13th century, containing prayers to be said at the canonical hours in honour of the Virgin Mary. The growing demand for smaller such books for family and individual use created a prayerbook style enormously popular among the wealthy.
Why can t we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin? ›
It would take, of course, the area of about a million pin- heads because, instead of there being just the 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia, there are 24 million volumes. The million pinheads can be put in a square of a thousand pins on a side, or an area of about 3 square yards.
What was the last entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica? ›
Poor Zywiec. For years, this Polish city (population 32,000) has had the distinction of being the final entry in the print edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the last word in the 44-million-word opus.