Method
How the page counts are made
Every figure comes from Open Library's catalogue of editions. This page says exactly which editions count and how.
Which books
We ranked works by how many times Open Library readers put them on a reading-log shelf (want to read, currently reading, already read) or rated them, using the 2026-09-30 data dump. Starting from the 60,000 most-shelved works, a book is included only when at least 5 English-language print editions record a page count. 15,621 works passed; the site shows the 4,000 most-read of them.
Which editions
- English-language editions only, because translations change the page count.
- Print only: audiobooks, ebooks, braille, video and microform records are left out.
- Only the edition's own number-of-pages field is used, between 8 and 6,000. Free-text pagination notes are ignored.
- An ISBN that appears twice is counted once.
- Editions under half or over 2.2 times the first median are set aside: these are almost always abridged texts, omnibus volumes or typing errors. Each book page says how many were set aside.
What the numbers mean
Median pages is the middle value of the editions that count. Range is the shortest and longest of them. The middle half (25th to 75th percentile) is shown where it helps. We never fill a missing page count with a guess: books without enough editions are not on the site.
Reading time
Pages × 275 words per page ÷ reading speed. 275 words per page is our assumption for a typical paperback page. The default speed is 260 words per minute for books Open Library tags as fiction and 238 otherwise, from Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis. Word counts are estimates from the same assumption; Open Library does not record word counts.
Series order
Series and each book's number in it come from Wikidata, matched to Open Library by its work id. A series is shown when Wikidata numbers at least three books and two or more of them have page data here.
Covers
The book covers on this site are plain typographic placeholders we draw ourselves. Publisher cover art is not used.
Corrections
Open Library is edited by its readers. If an edition's page count is wrong there, fixing it on openlibrary.org corrects it here at the next monthly rebuild.
Data: Open Library monthly data dumps (works, editions, authors, reading log, ratings) (Open Library / Internet Archive); How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate (Marc Brysbaert, Journal of Memory and Language 109 (2019)); Wikidata: part of the series (P179) and series ordinal (Wikimedia Foundation / Wikidata contributors).