How Long is That Digital Book?
14. Aug, 2010 
18 Comments
In talking about digital books with folks I’ve discovered there’s a need for a new metric by which to judge books. With print books we can easily categorize them as “slim” or “normal” or “doorstop.” (Or, in the case of The Wheel of Time series or the Harry Potter books, a “barricade” of books.) Everyone gets it. The more mammoth the book, the more reading pleasure one may get out of it.
With digital books, this just doesn’t work. When folks ask me about the iPad or Sony Reader, and I tell them that I currently have over 300 books in the device, they view this claim skeptically. There clearly isn’t enough room in so slender a device for that many books. For some folks, 300 books is more than they have in their personal libraries. (For some, it’s more books than they’ve seen in a lifetime.) I explain that books are fairly small files. In fact, in the 3.13 gigs I used to store the movie Up on my iPad, I could have had over 6,000 stories in pdf format—and that format tends to be fairly piggish compared to epub.
Even the more precise (though deceptive) metric of page count doesn’t help much. Because you can vary the size of the type and, therefore the number of words on a page, page count is mutable. While authors keep count in words (since we so often get paid by the word), word count means nothing to the average reader. A book described as a doorstop could be anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 words. It’s as if someone asks how fast you were driving, and you reply, “Peaches.” I’m sure, somehow, you can make that math work, but the average person can’t.
What we need is a simple way to calculate the number of hours it takes for someone to read something. In this case, the someone will be an “average reader.” Difficult concept, I know, but for our purposes we’ll designate this person as someone comfortable reading at an eighth grade reading level. That’s pretty much the reading community. While many of us can shift into a higher gear to read technical material, for relaxation and fun, the eighth grade reading level suits us just fine.
The British Broadcasting Company uses the read rate of three words per second as the pace they want their readers to hit. That works out to be just a bit more than 10,000 words per hour. Assuming for our purposes that a reader is not reading under ideal circumstances allowing for complete concentration, 10,000 words an hour is about right for reading speed. (If you read faster, please do not leave a comment telling me my math is off. You’re manifestly not the average reader of which I speak. You’re obviously a voracious reader. My mortgage holder and I both thank you for your patronage down through the years. Use the following calculations and compare your speed to the suggested speed, then you’ll know how to handicap Hours of Reading Pleasure (HRP) when you see it.)
So, Hours of Reading Pleasure (HRP) equals Word Count/10,000. Pretty simple math. A short story will run between a half and full hour. A novel like Talion: Revenant should be good for 17 HRP. The way I write most of my books, a chapter should take you fifteen minutes, and there’s not a single one of my novels that should come in under 8 HRP. Fortress Draconis, my longest, would hit 21.7 HRP (21 hours, 42 minutes).
I think it’s important that writers and publishers adopt the HRP scale for our digital works for two obvious reasons. First, people tend to plan their activities based on time available. If they have a half hour available, knocking off a short story makes sense. If they’re going on a long plane trip, a novel makes sense. We’ll be giving them the information they need to make a wise choice among their entertainment alternatives—a service that makes our work even more accessible.
Second, every other medium has time data associated with it, from music and podcasts, to TV shows and movies. Compared to paying $14.95 to download a movie that will last for two hours, getting a 17 HRP novel for $5 is the bargain of the century. Heck, even a 22 minute TV show at $1.99 bites compared to a 45 minute novella at the same price. Because time consideration often outweighs financial considerations in entertainment selection, HRP proves that digital stories and novels are a great entertainment value. (Folks could even go the route of adding a “per hour” financial cost to their descriptions of work.)
It’s no secret that books (digital or print) are great value for money. Helping readers understand that, and making our work more useful to them, is a wonderful way to keep ourselves relevant in the future.
Nice post, Mike. I love the HRP concept. I also think it would be useful (as a comparison) to list some common print books that way. (eg. Stephen King’s The Stand is 25 HRP or whatever).
Great post Mike. I’ve wondered about this myself. I think you have a great idea with the HRP concept. I think it makes even more sense in a way for people to choose a length of fiction they want then page count, it’s just easier than trying to calculate by page count.
Fictionwise already includes a “reading time” statistic on books where they know the word count. They assume reading speeds between 15000 to 21000 words per hour.
I really like this idea. It’s simple, and gives the reader some valuable information on the length.
While the time frame isn’t as exact as music (it’s 4:15 minutes exactly for everyone), people getting used to that would know how long a book takes them to read at that standard. Sort of like publishers use 250 words on a standard format page as a standard, but that isn’t accurate to how many words are really on that page. Usually it’s higher since it is counting total space and not actual words.
I think you’ve hit on something that should be adopted.
I am stuck on the idea of people who have not seen 300 books in their lifetime. I know there are lots of them, but not ever having been in a library is just *alien* to me…
Kevin,
I’m glad they include that number. I think a 6000 word and hour spread is a bit wide, but it’s a useful metric. (I also think they’re not thinking of the average reader, but I could be wrong.)
Yeah, I don’t know what the best average is. I suspect that the “national” average is lower than the “people who regularly read fiction” average. If 80% of my customers read faster than the average, then I’d probably adjust my HPR upward.
Still, it would be nice if e-publishers agreed to a standard and then buyers could, as you mention in the post, adjust for their personal reading speeds.
An alternative approach is to use page count. An average paperback book page has about 500 words. Some more, some less. So, a 100,000 word book is about 200 pages. People have a frame of reference for that.
Terri,
That would be a great idea, but your count for words per page is off by about 35%, at least based on the word-count to page ratio of the books on my shelf. Whenever I want to know the word count on a published novel, I actually count the words on five sample pages, take an average, then multiply by the page count. As you suggest, type style and size and leading account for a great deal of variance.
Since authors already know the word count, there’s no need to make a reference to pages for digital work. In fact, because page count is very fluid in digital books, bringing it into the equation would confuse some folks.
It should be noted that standard manuscript format on 8.5 x 11 is counted as 250 words. But that counts spaces as well (because space takes up space on a page!). So they get a 300 page manuscript and they say it has 75,000 words. The publisher also has a standard average word count per page for a trade paperback, for a hard back of a particular size, for a mass market book, etc., so they can divide that into the 75,000 words and get a fairly accurate projection of what size each of those formats would be in pages.
So if you were to do page count, to mimic a paperback book, you’d still have to settle on whether you’re talking trade paperback or mass market, etc. Even in books that varies. As already mentioned, its even more fluid in ebooks. On my smart phone, the above book would probably be around 900-1000 pages or more.
I think everyone would understand how long it takes the average reader to read something, and it will work no matter the platform.
“Hours of Reading Pleasure” strikes me as a too-slick marketing term, as it presumes whatever novel you’re discussing is going to be an enjoyable read, and granted, it does sound better than, “hours of painful slogging because someone who you thought had good taste recommended it to you”.
I still doubt such a concept will take off, in part because both reading speed and what one finds pleasurable tends to be quite personal, and unlike movies, tv shows, or songs, the speed can even be dependent on the pleasure you feel in reading the novel or story. Also, while you may plan viewing tv or movies based upon time constraints, I can’t ever remember doing the same with a book. Not that I haven’t devoured a few fair sized volumes in a single sitting, but ordinarily the novels I read get read whenever I have the free time, rather than based upon how much time its going to take me. And lets face it, having the number of hours laid out for you can be somewhat daunting. Even seeing that Talion: Revenant is a 17HRP book had me questioning if I really wanted to invest that much time to read the book, and that’s after having already read it a half dozen times.
Also, consider the poor buggers who read on the slow side. I can’t think of a better way to discourage them from investing the time to become wider read than providing them with an easily measurable yardstick of how slow and crappy a reader they are.
Page counts may not be the most accurate of measure, but any time anyone has ever asked me how long a book was, that was the number they were looking for. They may be somewhat meaningless when it comes to electronic novels, but an equivalent to paper count shouldn’t be too hard to come up with.
Somewhat bigger sellers could add a personal setting for it. e.g.: I am a slow/medium/fast reader.
Or add a “calculator”. You enter names of books and the time it took you to read it and it calculates the estimation from it. Of course, this assumes that poeple are honest to themselves.
Great concept. Let’s us it. It can be fine-tuned easily, if needed.
In case Mr. Stackpole reads this: Your link to Jethro Tull is misspelled.
I like the idea! It puts that on par of audio books. Make sue to have that asterisk that states reading times may vary based on speed of reader, intelligence and/or political affiliation.
Your original suggestion may or may not be the best way, but we’d have to get a standards body to establish the reading speed metric. (I know, I know, you used a number from the BBC, so maybe that’s the one, but maybe the SFWA should adopt one.)
My wife (the author) and I realized this was a problem because the main knock on her book from DTPs was its length at 180K words. What she settled on was this:
Approx: 180,000 words (This would be the equivalent of 450 pages in a trade paperback. Average novel is 100,000 words.) I arrived at the trade paperback figure by formatting it in a PDF file for that size with the appropriate margins. I considered using the length of other well-known books as a yardstick (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_of_a_novel for reference), but she was worried that comparing her book to a classic by saying “the same length as Dune” or “one third the length of War and Peace” solely for word length would bring other unwanted associations along with it. (Are your comparing your work to Dune? Are there sand worms?)
The only problems I see are the kind of hokey marketing implicit in the name and the variations in people’s reading speed especially since people with e-readers are probably faster than the average at this point. Why would you buy a Kindle if you don’t read a lot meaning you probably read a lot faster than someone who doesn’t read much.
I like the trade paperback metric because most readers are still familiar with book sizes and page counts, but it will become more of a problem moving forward. Perhaps people will just get familiar with the word length metric.
Thanks for bringing up the problem and suggesting a solution.
When I start my publishing company. I will use HRP.
You could substitute the word time for the word pleasure. Giving you HRT – this is less assuming.
After all the buying of a book is very similar to a futures contract on time ~ one hopes value is going to be there and that a “profit” will be made on the contract.
As an aside this is why the ghost written blockbuster formula novels are so heavily invested in by B6 – they’re like Government bonds for readers, boring, low return, but safe.
Great concept Mr. Stackpole