
Why Are Books Getting Longer?
This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I’ve had a theory, for a while now, that books are getting longer. It wasn’t until recently that I took some time to compile the data, and frankly, I was surprised at just how right I was.
Obviously part of this experiment meant finding average book lengths for a cross-section of time long enough to mean anything. So I went 110 years back to 1904, and did some research for every 10 years. So I Googled “Best Books of…1904…1914…1924…etc.” and Google’s wizardry helped me out quite a bit, because the search results display an immediate gallery of books. It ends up being a combination of prize winners, best sellers, and attention garners. Perfect.
So I then took those books, went to Amazon and found page numbers for the Kindle versions (just to keep things on the same playing field), and averaged them out. It’s not perfect, but it’s about as good as you’re going to get. While there are a couple outliers, the trend is clear:
- 1904 – 219 pages
- 1914 – 260 pages
- 1924 – 320 pages
A few notes on this data:
- There was a large dip in ‘54 and ‘64. It could be that average book lengths were going up so quickly it sort of reached critical mass. It could have something to do with popular genres of the time – which were serialized fantasy and crime novels (Chronicles of Narnia, Agatha Christie). Either way, after the dip, book lengths skyrocketed back up.
- I included 2013 since it was the last full year of data I had to work with, and I knew it would be a “big” year with The Goldfinch (755 pages), Cuckoo’s Calling (561), Life After Life (512), The Luminaries (849), etc.
- For the last 40 years, we’ve been mostly up and over 400 pages for the average length of popular and prize-winning novels. That’s nearly double what it was a century ago. What gives?