Rob’s Blog

The latest Harry Potter book has 607 pages. There are, on average, 350 per page in a book using the same page size as this one. The average person can read roughly 275 words per minute. This means the average person takes 1.272727… minutes to read a page, or 1 minute and 16 seconds. This totals 12.8 hours to read the entire book, or 12 hours, 48 minutes and 52 seconds.

This does of course assume that everyone is an average reader. I think its a fair assumption. If you don’t, tough.

The maximum working week in the UK is 48 hours (assuming no overtime). There are 47 working weeks in the year (assuming you take no sick leave). This gives a total working time for each person of 2,256 hours per year.

11 million copies of the 7^th Harry Potter book have been sold so far, taking 16,080.5269 man-years to read through. This equates to 1,329 people spending their entire working lives (without going sick) reading the damn book. This is at a cost to the economy (assuming they are paid minimum wage) of £754,130,051 (not including inflation and changes to the minimum wage).

To put this in perspective, that total could pay for:

• 1,005 wind turbines
• Over 15 million unicycles
• 340 acres of land in London
• 2 and a half Airbus A380s
• Ever so slightly under one Wembley Stadium

Let this be a lesson to you all: reading damages the economy, wastes many man-hours of working time and uses valuable trees.

I would reveal the ending and the names of the characters that meet their maker, but for some reason my math teacher doesn’t like the idea…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.