Xkcd how many readers

Across five years [[A table, with the columns labeled "how often you do the task" and the rows labeled "how much time you shave off". The column headings are, from left to right, "50 day", "5 day", "daily", "weekly", "monthly", and "yearly".

The row headings are, from top to bottom, "1 second", "5 seconds", "30 seconds", "1 minute", "5 minutes", "30 minutes", "1 hour", "6 hours", and "1 day". Row values "how long you can work" are as follows heading, then values : 1 second: 1 day, 2 hours, 30 minutes, 4 minutes, 1 minute, 5 seconds. This is a complicated question. Getting accurate counts of the number of extant books at different times in history is very hard bordering on impossible.

For example, when the Library of Alexandria burned, a lot of writing was lost, [1] On the other hand, a lot of Egyptian readers were probably excited to get out of overdue book fines.

Some estimates range from 40, books to , scrolls, [2] The Great Library of Alexandria and other writers say that all those numbers are implausible. Researchers Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden used historical book catalogs to put together statistics on the number of books or manuscripts published annually per region. Most of the manuscripts published in weren't in English, or even the variants of English common at the time. In , literature was typically written in some form of Latin or French, even in areas where Old English was commonly spoken on the street.

The Canterbury Tales written in the late s were part of a move toward vernacular English as a literary language, although they're not exactly readable to a modern eye:. Even if we know how many manuscripts were published per year, in order to answer Gregory's question, we still need to know how long it takes to read a manuscript. Rather than trying to figure out how long all the lost books and codices are, we can step back and take a longer view of things.

Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings in 11 years, which means that he wrote at an average pace of words per day, or less than 0. Harper Lee wrote the ,word To Kill a Mockingbird in two and a half years, for an average of words per day, or 0. Since To Kill a Mockingbird is her only published book, her lifetime average is 0. Some writers are substantially faster.

This strip is in the form of a long series of quotes. Here, each quote is given as a separate panel. Attribution is delimited with a Some text is bolded; it is enclosed in asterisks.

Now, however, we think we are too busy for such old-fashioned correspondence. The torpid brain If a picture catches the public fancy, the public must have an etched or a photogravured copy of it within a month or two of its appearance.

The days when engravers were wont to spend two or three years over a single plate are for ever gone.