Loading Reading Pages Per Day…
17 pages
360 pages left over 22 reading days, finishing Tue 8 Sep 2026.
Minutes are missing because nothing here knows how fast you read. The figures that circulate for words a minute come from studies of adults reading ordinary prose silently, and they say nothing about a particular reader working through a particular set text with footnotes. Read ten pages with a stopwatch, put the two numbers in above, and the daily figure turns into a time you can actually put in a diary.
Pages are rounded up: a day cannot end four fifths of the way down a page and have that count. Rounding up on every day also builds in a small cushion, which is the right direction for the error to run when the alternative is arriving at the last day with thirty pages left.
Two questions hide inside "how much should I be reading a day". The first is arithmetic: pages left, divided by days left. The second is the one that decides whether the plan survives the week, because seventeen pages a day is a trivial commitment for one book and an hour and a half of concentration for another. This tool answers the first immediately and refuses to answer the second until you have timed yourself on the actual text, which takes about a quarter of an hour and is the only measurement that means anything.
Most calculators of this kind multiply your pages by a words-per-minute figure and a words-per-page figure, both of which they invented. The reading-rate research that does exist measures adults reading continuous, ordinary prose silently under laboratory conditions, and reports a wide spread even then. None of it describes a particular reader working through a particular set text with footnotes, tables, unfamiliar names and a paragraph they have to go back over twice.
Words per page is the shakier half of that guess. A mass-market paperback and a densely set critical edition can differ by a factor of three on the same trim size, so a constant applied to both is not an approximation, it is a fabrication. Rather than pick numbers that would look authoritative and be wrong for most books, this tool leaves both timing boxes empty and says plainly what it cannot work out without them.
Four hundred and twenty pages with sixty already behind you leaves 360 to read. Across twenty-two days, counting today and the finishing date, that is 16.4 pages a day, shown as seventeen because a day cannot end four fifths of the way down a page and have it count. Rounding up every day also builds a small cushion, which is the direction the error should run.
Now time yourself: ten pages in fifteen minutes is 1.5 minutes a page on this book. Seventeen pages is then about twenty-five minutes a day, and the whole remainder is nine hours of reading. Those figures are yours rather than an average, they change if you swap to a harder chapter, and they are the ones you can actually defend when deciding whether the plan is realistic.
Three inputs get a sentence rather than a pace. A book already finished reports that nothing is left and that anything further is re-reading. A date that has gone reports how long ago it went along with the pages still outstanding, because a pace cannot be worked out backwards. And a stretch in which every day has been marked as one you will not read produces no division at all, since there is nowhere for the pages to go.
Reading plans fail on the days nobody counted. Sunday visits, shifts, the evening class, the week the flat is being painted: these are the days that quietly turn seventeen pages a day into twenty-four, and a plan that ignored them was never a plan. Marking a weekday as one you will not open the book is not pessimism, it is the difference between a schedule you follow and a schedule you abandon in the second week.
Ten pages is plenty, and a chapter is better still. Pick a stretch that is typical of the book rather than the introduction, which is usually easier going than whatever follows it.
Use whatever unit you can count reliably and time yourself in the same unit. Chapters work fine as long as they are roughly even; where they are not, page numbers give a steadier division across the days.
Because defaults are rarely changed and would be treated as authoritative. A figure sitting in the box would quietly become the answer for most visitors, and it would be wrong for most books.
Only if your timed run included them. Time yourself reading the way you will actually read for this module, annotating as you go, and the minutes will reflect the real work rather than a skim.
Update the pages read and the tool redivides what is left across the days that remain. The daily figure rising is not a reprimand, it is the honest cost of the days already spent.