Question Am i reading too slowly or WNs are too long in general?

I think i am reading WN waay way slowly than i do normal books even though the pace feels the same. I think this way because, i remember reading for two hours but i advanced only around 20 chapters. If we say the novel is 600 chapters it needs a month of reading 2 hours per day. But in normal books lets say one page in a minute, i would finish 9 books of 400 pages in that amount of reading. Yes i know the novels are really long compared to normal books but how do people fit like 100 novels in their lifetime (i heard it is not uncommon)? Am i reading so slowly? If not then reading a more than a thousand chapters long novel really worth it considering the amount of literature you can consume instead?

 

Chinese authors are paid per word(character)

So yes, in that case they are too long.

Korean web novels are sold per chapter, so it is also in the best interest of the author to make the novel as long as possible

 

Both.

PS. Just 100 novels? Do you mean novel series or single volumes? Because 100 novels in, let's say, 50 years (and the average reader will have more time than that) boils down to 2 novels per year, which seems to slow of a pace for either interpretation (even including other forms of storytelling and entertainment as time hoggers).

 

If you can catch up by reading overgeared from start to the current translated chapters in one to two weeks I'd say you're pretty fast imo and 100 novels in a Lifetime probably meant y'know reading only for fun and not addiction.

 

Well it took me to finish a will eternal two years lol. (though i was reading multiple novels at the same time and took months of breaks from reading it)

 

Once you have read a decent amount of web novels, say 50+ at least, you'll have a gist of which parts to skip or skim through. It's even more so if you've been reading those of similar genre and story. I'll probably be able to finish a 1500-chapter CN web novel in a week at most excluding those that have excellent storytelling of course. KR and JP web novels still have some depth to them though that a 300-chapter web novel will take me at least 3-4 days to finish.

 

So the secret is skimming

 

I've found my word per minute with physical books is higher than when reading on my PC so that might also be a factor

 

I reckon it could be the format thingy.
Physical book of ~400 pages i could read in approx 4-5 hours if it's interesting. Reading on phone would take a lot longer, while reading on PC i would give up after 10 pages.
Not to mention the fact, that i often get distracted if i am reading on phone, while with physical books i stay focused.
Could be just me but at least thats how i feel it.

 

The easiest way to figure out is to convert all of this to word length. A typical Chinese chapter is around 1500 - 2000 words in translation. So take the average of that and we'd have 1750 words a chapter. 20 chapters of this is 35,000 words in 2 hours, or about 290 words a minute. This is a shade faster than the typical reading speed of 250 words a minute. Books in paperback are usually around 270 words a page so a 400 page book will be around 110,000 words, or the equivalent of around 60 Chinese chapters. These numbers all check out, so it means is that your reading speed is pretty darned consistent!

So to answer your broader question, a 600 chapter novel is going to be about the same as 10 of these 400 page books, so yeah they're awfully long. It would come out to a shade over 1,000,000 words, or longer than the Lord of the Rings (including the appendices). Note that the book that's usually used as a reference for overly long novels is War and Peace and it only comes out to 590,000 words, or just about half this length. Is this worth it? It all depends on what you like reading. Technically speaking, the best books out there are the classics so if you're reading anything other than these then you're wasting your time. But not everyone out there likes reading the classics, so this equation is going to weigh out differently for them.

 

I'm currently reading Lord of The Mysteries and I checked its total word count and it has over 2.7 million words. For reference, the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series has over 1.7 million words.

 

You're not reading slowly. WNs are just very long.

Don't worry too much about it. Read at your own pace and have fun~

It depends on how much of a reading culture your country has.

Plenty of people over here never read any book in their entire lifetime. People that read as much as 1 book/year are also incredibly rare.

So, 2 books per year is actually a pretty big number if you look at the big picture... Granted, it looks like a small number if you are looking only at bookworms, but like... Then you're using a sample group that will naturally read way more than the average.

Like, NU is a community of readers, so if you were to ask how many books the people on NU read per month, you'd probably find it common for people to mention they read at least 1 book per week or something... Which makes sense when looking at the NU userbase, but is also a huge outlier when looking at things from a broader perspective.

 

I was taking into acount that he seemed to be speaking about cramming the reading of novels as much as possible, while those who read two to less thgan one a year tend to pick a book just anecdotically. Of course, that he was speaking about the purposedly bloated for-profit chinese WN and counting each neverending series as one novel somehow fell into my blind spot.

 

they're indeed long
it differs based on the novel but let's just assume a chapter is about ten pages
600 chapter would be 6000 page
if you read a page in a minute
and you read around 2 hours a day
then you'd need at least 50 days to finish a webnovel
even so , how did i read more than 100 webnovel?
i've got nothing else to do (;´༎ຶٹ༎ຶ`)

 

I mean, I did say "At least 1/week", since it varies a lot from person to person~

But yeah, it can definitely go much higher than just 1/week, with 1/day not being a huge stretch... >.>

 

when you read, you learn how to read fast after some time
it will come to you on its own

 

It can also be due to the fact that Webnovel are just more interesting so take your time and enjoy