How long does it take to read Cognitive Surplus?
Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky takes about 4 hours 26 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 26 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2010. 242 pages, about 66,550 words.
9 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 24 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 26 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 46 minutes |
The page count is the median across 10 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
"Every single year for the second half of the 20th century, the amount of television watched by humanity increased. Collectively, we now watch more than one trillion hours of television every year – something not entirely unlike, as Clay Shirky sees it, tipping the free time of the world's educated citizenry (their "cognitive surplus") down an intellectual plughole. It's not that television is evil, or even bad. It's just that, as a medium, it's incredibly good at soaking up leisure and producing very few tangible results. It tells stories, it makes people feel less alone, it passes the time. It is, Shirky ventures, a little like gin in 1720s London, helping people cope with modernity by gently blurring the edges of their reality." More by Tom Chatfield on The Guardian
Subjects: society, Internet, web, media, communication, autonomy
