How long does it take to read The Information?
A History, a Theory, a Flood
The Information by James Gleick takes about 9 hours 39 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 9 hours 39 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2011. 526 pages, about 144,650 words.
20 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 16 hours 4 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 9 hours 39 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 6 hours 2 minutes |
The page count is the median across 13 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood begins with the tale of colonial European explorers and their fascination with African talking drums and their observed use to send complex and widely understood messages back and forth between villages far apart, and over even longer distances by relay. The book then covers informational implications of technologies from drum signaling to the long distance telephone. Starting with symbolic written language, The Information examines the history of intellectual insights central to the development of information theory, detailing key figures responsible such as Claude Shannon, Charles Babbage (1791-1871), Ada Byron, Samuel Morse, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and John Archibald Wheeler.
Subjects: History, Information science, Information society, Long Now Manual for Civilization, Information, Informationssamhället
