Data story · listening vs reading time
Audiobook vs reading time: listening takes about 42% longer than reading
An audiobook takes longer than reading the same book, because a narrator reads slower than your eyes. Pairing real narration times with page counts for 1,782 books, listening runs about 42% longer than silent reading at normal speed.
A typical narrator reads aloud far slower than you read silently, so the same book takes longer as audio. For the 1,782 books where we hold both a real narration time and a page count, the median audiobook runs 9.6 hours against an estimated 6.8 hours of silent reading, about 42% longer. That is also exactly the gap a 1.25x-1.5x playback speed closes.
The gap, genre by genre
The genres with the biggest gap are the ones narrators slow down for; the narrower gaps are the faster-read genres. Either way the fix is the same: listening at speed closes most of the difference, which is why speed controls exist.
Frequently asked
- Does an audiobook take longer than reading?
- Yes, at normal speed. Across 1,782 books we measured, listening takes about 42% longer than silent reading, because a narrator reads aloud more slowly than you read silently (about 238 wpm).
- Is listening to an audiobook the same speed as reading?
- Not at 1x, but close at speed. Listening at 1.25x to 1.5x roughly matches the 238-wpm silent-reading pace this comparison uses.
Read with your ears
Listening takes a bit longer than reading, and doubles as your commute.
New members at audiobooks.com get three free audiobooks with the trial.
Start listening freeMethodology.Narration time is the store's real listed duration; silent-reading time = pages × 275 words ÷ 238 words a minute, using one cited external constant: Brysbaert (2019), Journal of Memory and Language: meta-analytic mean silent-reading speed for English prose, about 238 words per minute. Everything else is computed from our own data; genre medians use primary-genre pools with at least 30 store-verified books. Real narration durations are the store-listed running times of 1,784 author-verified audiobook editions (we read each retailer product page's own schema.org record; author identity confirmed per book). Dataset: 8,557 audiobooks measured by The Books Insider as of 2026-07-26. Listening hours are estimated from page counts (pages × 275 words ÷ 9,300 words/hour, ±10%); full method on the About page. Explore the full dataset on ouraudiobook statistics page.About & methodology →