Reading contest/word count question

My friends and I are having a book reading contest. We're competing to see how many books we can read in a year, starting in January. The problem we're coming across is how to determine the winner. We believe the easiest way to do it would be to go by word count. Amazon has a "Text Stats" link for a lot of their books that give the word count, but not all books have it. Foundation, by Asimov, for example, doesn't have the "Text Stats" link. Is there a way that word count can be found for any book? Do any of you have any suggestions of a good way of dertermining a winner?

 

Simple. Agree beforehand on the list of books to be read, in any order. Whoever finishes all the books first or the most books by the end of the time allotted, wins.

 

If you can't agree on that, then turn to page 17 of the book and count the number of words. Multiply that by the page count minus one. That will give you an approximate word count, factoring in the chapter pages where it's not a page full of text.

 

We want people to be free to read whatever they want. I don't know if a pre-determined list would work.

 

Just do total number of books.

Then you can cheat and read a bunch of comic books. And win.

 

For each book, estimate the number of words in a typical line and count the number of lines per page. Multiply those to get the rough number of words per page, then multiply by the page count.

 

Measuring the width of the book (as in the size of the spine) is an approach a lot of people take.

There's certain options for cheating like reading hardbacks rather than paperbacks, but if you're going to go to that much trouble for a couple of millimetres, not much is going to stop you!

 

But measuring the width of the spine doesn't take into account the size of the text for each book.

 

Well yeah, but most novels are pretty standard. I guess you could get large print books out of the library or read picture books if you wanted.

 

There are some standard books that have smaller type, like David R. George's Twilight.

 

All you can really do is use a word-count tool like Amazon's combined with an estimation method agreed upon by all parties. The only alternative is to ask the author.

(Counts seconds until someone chimes in that Asimov is dead)

Be sure that you're still having fun reading all these books. The reading shouldn't be a chore but a joy.

 

Not to nitpick, but there is also the fact that PBs pages aren't always uniformly the same thickness.

 

It was only a suggestion that was simpler than counting words...

 

Hey, it was a good idea, it just has a couple problems when you try to implement it.