See, what's interesting to me is that the grandparent comment describes "50 Shades" as ~8 hours of reading. The zero-sum argument assumes that reading time is some fixed value for all people. I don't remember how long it took me to read "50 Shades," but it was significantly less than 8 hours, and couldn't have been more than an hour. (I'm not saying that to brag. It takes me a lot longer to do many other things than many other people. My only point is that the author of the article completely ignores throughput variability in his calculus.)
Perhaps the hour mark is hyperbole - I haven’t read these books and have no desire to. But different books have different levels of linguistic complexity, and with simplistic writing I find myself reading at much, much faster rates.
In addition I find that when reading “bad writing” I have a natural tendency to (automatically) skip over long, tortured sentences that seem to be going nowhere. From reputation, “50 Shades” may qualify for that category.
