Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete vs The Bābur-nāma in English (Memoirs of Bābur)
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
34,106words between them — 2h 16m of it
Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete is longer — 489,307 words against 455,201 for The Bābur-nāma in English (Memoirs of Bābur), a difference of 34,106 words or about 2h 16m of extra reading. Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete is the harder read, at grade 11.4 against 6.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete | The Bābur-nāma in English (Memoirs of Bābur) | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Bourrienne, Louis Antoine Fauvelet de | Babur, Emperor of Hindustan |
| Words | 489,307 | 455,201 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 32h 37m | 30h 21m |
| Unique words | 19,464 | 21,612 |
| Sentences | 20,726 | 28,961 |
| Average sentence length | 23.6 words | 15.7 words |
| Reading grade | 11.4 | 6 |
| Reading ease | 55.6 | 80.3 |
| Long words | 13.3% | 6.8% |
Highlighted cells are the larger figure — except reading ease, where higher means easier.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions, same counting rule·REVIEWED JUL 2026
How this is worked out
- Both texts are counted the same way, from the same source, with Gutenberg's header and licence footer struck first.
- The gap is stated in words and then in time at 250 words a minute — the rate is printed because a duration without one cannot be checked.
- Difficulty is compared on Flesch–Kincaid grade, which reads sentence and word length only. It cannot see irony or dialect, so treat it as a measure of surface, not of effort.
gap = |489,307 − 455,201| = 34,106 words 34,106 ÷ 250 wpm = 2h 16m of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete or The Bābur-nāma in English (Memoirs of Bābur)?
Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete is longer — 489,307 words against 455,201 for The Bābur-nāma in English (Memoirs of Bābur), a difference of 34,106 words or about 2h 16m of extra reading. Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete is the harder read, at grade 11.4 against 6.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 3567 and no. 44608 — and from no other source. Neither book’s text is set on this site.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·US public domain·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Word counts and reading levels are computed from a specific public-domain edition and will differ from other editions and from other counting methods — see the method page.
