How Long to Read Every Book in a Bookstore

The Thought I Have in Every Bookstore

A small bookstore in Paris, a big Hugendubel in my hometown in Germany, the bookstore on the top floor of Bangkok's Central Embassy mall, and a bunch of random airport shops. Different cities, but I wonder the same thing every time: how long would it take to read it all? Then I get this feeling of relief: I'll never finish it anyway, so I can relax and pick only what I like.

For this article, I did the math anyway. For an average Barnes & Noble, the answer is about 1,900 years (if you're reading half an hour a day). Read on if you're interested in the math broken down, and in why how many books actually fit into your reading life matters more.

How Many Books Are in a Bookstore?

Barnes & Noble's last annual report as a public company (2019) puts its stores at about 19,000 to 133,000 unique titles each, and 66,000 on average. Just to be clear, 'unique titles' means different books (not copies), so ten copies of the same bestseller is still one book.

How Long to Read Every Book in a Barnes & Noble

An average book of about 300 pages has roughly 75,000 words (about 250 a page). The average adult reads about 238 words a minute, so an average book takes about 5 hours and 15 minutes.

Multiply that by 66,000 books, and you get about 347,000 hours of reading. Depending on how many of those hours you spend reading each day, here's how many years that would take:

At half an hour a day, finishing every book in one store takes about 1,900 years. Make reading a full-time job, eight hours a day with no days off, and it still takes 119 years. At my own pace (0.7 pages a minute, about 21 minutes a day), it's closer to 3,700 years.

The Math, Scaled

At half an hour a day, but with bigger shelves:

The shelf grows faster than anyone can read it. In 2025, US publishers released 642,242 traditionally published books, about 1,760 a day, not counting more than 3.5 million self-published ones. In the time it takes you to read one book at half an hour a day (about 10 days), roughly 18,500 new ones are added to shelves in the US alone.

To be fair, these are estimates built on estimates (Google's count treats every edition as its own book, for one). But swap in your own real numbers, and you'll still land far beyond one lifetime.

How Many Books Can You Read in a Lifetime?

A more useful question is how many books fit into your life. Same math as in another article of mine, stretched over about 60 years of adult reading:

At half an hour a day, a whole reading life means about 2,000 finished books (that's 3% of one Barnes & Noble, and 0.0016% of every book ever published). A full-time reading job for 60 years gets you through half of one store. For comparison, the typical American adult reads about five books a year (here's the breakdown), which adds up to 300 in those 60 years.

Part of that budget is already behind you. The free tool I built, called ShelfCheck, adds up the books you've read so far, and my article How Much of Your Life Have You Spent Reading? takes another look in the rearview mirror.

My own number is not as impressive. At 0.7 pages a minute and about 21 minutes a day, I read about 18 average-length books a year, which is roughly 1,100 over 60 years. (My 2026 count is higher, 31 books so far, because a lot of the books I read were a little shorter.)

Choosing Well Beats Reading Fast

Against numbers like these, speed barely matters. If I read at the average speed instead of my 0.7 pages a minute, I'd get almost 400 more books in 60 years, a rounding error next to 130 million. Making better book choices changes every one of my 1,100.

Choosing well includes choosing to stop. In August, I finished The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr only because I was 20 pages from the end. The finish felt good, and the last pages were great, but I should have quit way earlier (and I would, if I started it again today). With a budget this small, putting down a book that isn't 'worth its hours' is not failure.

The lifetime number won't change much about how I choose. Mood and curiosity already guide my book-picks. For me, it did confirm a rule I've gotten stricter about: sample first, then commit. How to Choose Your Next Book goes over that method, and How to Organize Your TBR List helps with the pile you already have.

Walk Out With Three

Some years ago in Amsterdam, before I switched over to ebooks-only, I read the first chapter of a book in a comfy chair inside the store, then bought it, and walked out with it. These days I only browse in bookstores. I sample in the store, and if I'm really interested, the book goes on my Apple Books wishlist. If I'm unsure, I download the sample and decide later.

You'll never finish the store, or even your own TBR, and to me that's a relief. You don't have to read everything. Just choose the next few well. My next three will be: The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner, MAKE by Pieter Levels, and maybe Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson (I'm still deciding on that one, so I'll read a sample first).

Next time you're standing in an aisle that seems to go on forever, don't try to want to read all of it. Pick the ones that actually excite you, sample them, and go home.