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Study: Stay off social media for one year and you'll get through 200 books on your reading list

Anna Rahmanan
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Anna Rahmanan
Senior National News Editor
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According to Charles Chu, a contributor at Better Humans, the average American spends about 608 hours a year on social media. That's a whole lot of time that could potentially be spent partaking in some other (maybe more productive) activity.

Take reading, for example. How many books would we be able to read in the time we usually allocate to our online world?

Bear with us, there's a bit of math involved in this. Chu assumes that, on average, people read 200 to 400 words per minute. Non-fiction books are typically composed of 50,000 words. Assuming you want to get through 200 books in one year, Chu made some calculations: 200 books of 50,000 words each amount to 10 million words to be read. If the average American reads 400 words per minute, it would take him 25,000 minutes to read the 10 million words. Moving on: 25,000 minutes equal 417 hours. Which means that to read 200 books, you have to spend 417 hours actually reading. Not only will you get through 200 books... But you'll have 191 hours leftover to tweet, post, snap, watch YouTube videos and stalk your friends on Facebook. It's a win-win, if you ask us.

You have to start somewhere, right? How about getting through our list of the best new books to read in September?

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