The most common answer to that question would be that it takes longer to read the book. However, there are a few exceptions such as The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. I decided to have a look at some popular books and short stories turned into either movies or tv-series and compare the time it would take to read them with the time it would take to watch the adaption. I’ve visualized the result in two graphs below. The time it would take to read a book has been calculated using the word count of the book and the average reading speed for adults, 300 words/minute.

Time to read the book vs. time to watch the movie or series Book Show logarithmic axes Movie/series length [hours] Time to read book [hours]

Hover over the dots to show information about each individual book or search for a specific book using the search field.

The graph below shows how many times longer it takes to read the book than to watch the movie. Hover over the bars to see word count and movie length.