Its Just

“Marriage can wait, education cannot.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I say you are reading to slow.

You need to read at least 93.5 mph.

According to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Around 2.2 million new titles are published worldwide each year.

If a book is in average 250 pages.
Or 3 cm.
That is 66 km of books every year.

Or just 180 meters of books every day.

If you can spend 4h/day to read you just need to read 45 meters of books an hour or 1500 bph (Books Per Hour).

You are probably reading at 0.025-0.1 books per hour.
But if you practice, you might have a chance?

If each book contains 250 pages.
And each page is on average 20 cm tall.
And you can spend 4h on average each day reading.

That means you have to read text at a speed of 187.5 km/h to keep up. However that is probably a bit too fast, since there is usually some white space on each page of a book so lets round it down to 150km/h.

According to Stephen Hawking

“if you stacked the new books being published next to each other, at the present rate of production you would have to move at ninety miles an hour just to keep up with the end of the line.”

90mph equals 144.841 km/h.

I say, Stephen Hawking was a bit too generous.

I calculated the reading speed needed on my own and came to the same approximately the same conclusion as Hawking.

Yes I know. Great minds think a like, but since I think my calculation was a bit better. It must mean I'm a bit smarter than him, right?

Not that I would want to flatter myself, just a little bit smarter is enough.

Now I just need to study physics so I can solve how we may travel back in time to keep up reading all the books or make an alternative world with less authors so we can keep up reading.

If you like me, think this situation is unacceptable.
You too may sign my petition to forbid anyone from writing more than one book of 250 pages in their entire life for the next 2000-10.000 years.
So we can catch up with reading all those books.

You will have to excuse me but I tried to set my goal of reading 2.3 million books next year here on goodreads. But it only allowed to set the counter to 99 thousand so unfortunately it will have to wait until they fix this.

I suspect the limit is there by intent. Since if everyone read all the books published each year and a few millions more, goodreads would not be needed. Their business model is based on you not reading 150kmbookpages/h.

I have contacted customer support, unfortunately they did not take my suggestion seriously, if you could please help me and also email them then hopefully they will come to their senses and fix this once they see there is a demand. (Don't do this, it's just a joke.)

In the meantime I will just go back to reading 10-20 books a year.”
― myself and Stephen Hawking?

“Brief answers to big questions or
brief questions with big answers?

Is that a brief question or a big questions?”
― My self