His Dark Materials
It tells a story. Hardcover files this book as fiction. A fact, not a factor: it plays no part in our call.
Not enough to go on
Nobody has recorded this collection as one audiobook: each book in it is recorded and sold on its own. A verdict on the whole would be a verdict on a listen nobody can buy, so we shrug rather than guess.
What you can do Take it a book at a time: each one has its own recording, so the question is really about the first of them.
Last searched Audible UK ·
Length does not decide this
about 36 hours to readabout 27 hours to readabout 22 hours to readabout 17 hours to readabout 14 hours to read
The reading time is our estimate: 1,088 pages at 30 pages an hour, the pace you told us. Ours is 50, about 300 words a page, read at 250 a minute. There is no runtime to set beside it, which also means no way to check how much of a book is on one of its pages.The reading time is our estimate: 1,088 pages at 40 pages an hour, the pace you told us. Ours is 50, about 300 words a page, read at 250 a minute. There is no runtime to set beside it, which also means no way to check how much of a book is on one of its pages.The reading time is our estimate: 1,088 pages at 50 pages an hour, which is about 300 words a page, read at 250 a minute. There is no runtime to set beside it, which also means no way to check how much of a book is on one of its pages.The reading time is our estimate: 1,088 pages at 65 pages an hour, the pace you told us. Ours is 50, about 300 words a page, read at 250 a minute. There is no runtime to set beside it, which also means no way to check how much of a book is on one of its pages.The reading time is our estimate: 1,088 pages at 80 pages an hour, the pace you told us. Ours is 50, about 300 words a page, read at 250 a minute. There is no runtime to set beside it, which also means no way to check how much of a book is on one of its pages.
Reading load against listening load
We hold no recording of this one, so “In your ears” and “Audio disadvantage” are what we would expect of a recording of it: read off how the book itself reads, and never measured against a reading that exists.
Where that puts this one among the books we hold: in the middle 40% of our shelf of books on both counts (effort on the page and effort in your ears). The middle of the scale is not the middle of the shelf (most books sit below the average on both), so a book at 0.00 is already in the top 43% for effort on the page. Each of the three is measured against the whole shelf separately, so the bottom figure is not the top two subtracted. It is this book’s own distance from the middle.
What the audio disadvantage is made of. Two things and no others: how fast readers say this one moves, and how demanding the reviews we read found it. There is no third: the structural one has no data source, so it contributes nothing rather than being guessed at. Both directions are declared priors we have never fitted against a real verdict, which is the weakest-evidenced part of the whole model.
How the call was made
Where a bar carries ticks, the grey one is the middle of our shelf and a coloured one is a line we publish, cool where we start backing the page, warm where we start backing the recording. The evidence squares at the foot are a different thing: how far each of our four sources went, hatched where there was nothing to measure at all.
- What is at stake
- 0.69It sits in the top 25% of our shelf of books for how well the print crowds think of a book: well enough regarded that a wasted first encounter costs more, so we lean towards protecting the page. Blended across 170,339 Goodreads ratings and 21 on Hardcover, each scored inside its own population first, and never added together.
- Evidence
- 0.16How much of the picture we actually have, out of 1.00: four questions, each answered as far as the source could answer it, less anything taken off for reading fewer reviews than we aim to.The readingnot measured: there is no recording of this one to attestThe second sourceHardcover knows this book, with 21 readers there: thinner than we would likeThe matchnot measured: with no recording, there was nothing to matchThe reviewsWe read 300 reviews to judge how demanding it is: as good as it getsWe are also missing something we treat as essential: no single recording of the whole collection; too little of the record overall.
What each crowd complains about
We would need 40 reviews from each crowd before setting the two side by side, and only 23 of the reviews we read said they listened to it. So we are not drawing this one.
What the two crowds said
the book itselfGoodreads
the book itself, against Goodreads’ own crowd
170,339 ratings
The series
His Dark Materials
No more announced yet
3 books numbered on Goodreads’ list, with 5 novellas or companions filed between them. Everything Goodreads lists is published, the last of it in 2022, and nothing new is announced, which is not the same thing as finished. We start saying finished after five quiet years.
From Goodreads’ own series index, checked on 11 September 2026.