How long does it take to read the Harry Potter series?

The seven Harry Potter books come to 1,084,170 words, which at an average adult reading speed is about 76 hours — a little over three days of continuous reading. The books grow steeply: Order of the Phoenix alone is 257,045 words, more than three times the first book and longer than the first two combined. That is unusual in children's publishing, where series normally hold a consistent length, and it happened because Rowling's editors stopped cutting once the books were guaranteed bestsellers. The audiobooks take considerably longer than reading, at roughly 117 hours for the Jim Dale narration, because speech is slower than silent reading.

The numbers

Total

3 days 3 hours

In hours

75.9 hours

Non-stop

3.2 days without sleeping

Covers

7 books, 1,084,170 words

At a realistic pace

an hour a night

That works out as

about 76 days

As an audiobook

4 days 21 hours

What this assumes

1,084,170 words at 238 words per minute, the median adult silent reading rate for non-fiction prose from Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis. Fiction is read a little faster, around 260 wpm, which would bring this down to about 69 hours.

Broken down

Word counts are from a widely reproduced per-book table rather than a figure published by the publisher; no primary source states them. The audiobook figure is derived from Audible's stated one-billion-listening-hours milestone.

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