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Harry Potter: Fans have listened to books for one billion hours

boy reading harry potter bookImage source, Lisa Maree Williams
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Harry Potter fans have been listening to the books A LOT over the last seven years, but how do you read your books?

What could you do in a billion hours?

Build your own spaceship? Invent time travel maybe?

Well, as it turns out, one thing you've already done is listen to the Harry Potter audiobooks!

Image source, JGI/Tom Grill
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Pottermore Publishing released the statistics to celebrate their ten year anniversary

Pottermore Publishing have announced that Harry Potter fans have clocked a massive one billion hours listening to the tale of the Boy Who Lived on Audible.

That's the same as someone listening to them for over 100,000 years.

But do YOU listen to your books, or do you prefer reading a hard copy? We want to know - do our vote, and tell us why in the comments!

If you can't see this vote, click here.

The Harry Potter books were made available on the audiobook platform Audible seven years ago, with Stephen Fry reading the UK version and Jim Dale performing it for US audiences.

Stephen Fry said: "These statistics are astonishing. Almost every day someone will come up and tell me how important the audiobooks have been in their lives, and it means the world to me.

Image source, Samir Hussein / Getty
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Stephen Fry is the voice of the Harry Potter books in the UK

"From the first book, when it was all there was of Harry Potter in the world, to the final novel when the series had confirmed itself as the publishing phenomenon of our age, the experience was never anything other than a total and eternally surprising joy for me."

In one billion hours, you could...
  • Learn roughly two million languages

  • Watch 461,538,461 movies

  • Get through 153,846,154 days of school

The billion hours were calculated by adding up all the time listened to the Harry Potter books in English, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Latin American Spanish, and Castilian Spanish.

If you cannot see the quiz, click here.