Clara HD Am I having innacurate reading time or is it normal?

[johnydon3]

So i have been reading a lot in my Clara HD since i got it a couple of weeks ago, i like to have the remaining time for chapter on and i love the fact that with kobo you can have book and chapter remaining time, both at the same time.

The problem is that it is very innacurate, i know for facts that it takes me 6 hours to read a 300 page book ( i know my reading spead and i have put it to test with kindle and nook readers and 6 hours is what takes me to read 300 pages as i mentioned), but what i get for example a 300 pages book it shows : BOOK REMAINING TIME: 3.1 hours, a and chapters from 20 pages, kobo shows me 10 minutes left, but when i go to koreader it says a more accurate time, like 30 minutes and i put that to test with my clock and it is very accurate ....is there any way to fix it with the default kobo reader?

[DNSB]

Personally, I've found the reading times on any ereader or ereader app I've used are horribly inaccurate at best. In the book I am currently re-reading (Destiny's Shield), the time left in the chapter after reading the first two screens is 0 minutes and the time left in the book at 28% read is 5 hours to go. Considering that I personally consider that it will take about 2.5 hours to read the book so at 28% in after 40 minutes, ~2 hours left to go (total words are 151K).

Besides, reading is not a competitive sport so take the timings as being estimates based on some developer's idea of an average reading speed and nothing to do with reality.

[Aleron Ives]

The Kobo doesn't measure the average time it takes you to turn pages and use that to calculate how long it will take you to finish the book? I guess the time estimates are even less useful than I thought they were.

[ro.nin]

I'm not entirely sure how Kobo measures and estimates reading time but I'm afraid in my experience I've found it completely inaccurate to the point where I just ignore them . It's a nice to have feature for just eyeballing whether I can sneak in a chapter for my train ride but doesn't bother me massively if I don't have it.

My old Kindle let me (not sure if this is still a thing) reset and calibrate reading speed for pretty accurate time estimates which was nice but I found Kobo's (Nickel) handling of x turns === x pp. versus whatever Kindle was doing to be something I personally prefer over having more accurate reading time estimates.

[rashkae]

for me, kobo reading time used to be very accurate, but it broke about 3 updates ago... (If you look at the Reading time estimate of a book, does it display your aveage page per minute? That field used to populate, but it no longer does, and time remaining estimate is, as you found, completely nonsensical now.)

If it matters, I read side-loaded kepub.. and haven't bothered to investigate this with the other possible formats/sources.

[embryo]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Personally, I've found the reading times on any ereader or ereader app I've used are horribly inaccurate at best.

In KOReader is really close to perfect for me.

[Cactus Chef]

I find the reading time is horribly inaccurate at first and then slowly improves as I read more of the book. So the initial estimate before I've even opened the book is usually way too high. Then I start reading, and if I only go a chapter or two, it then drops to something too low (I think flipping past the title, copyright, ToC, and Foreword pages might throw off the assumed reading speed). But by the time I'm a third of the way through or so, the estimates are usually pretty accurate.

I would be curious to know what the exact algorithm is for calculating it. But anecdotally, it seems like it starts with a fixed calculation of book length divided by some kind of average words per minute benchmark (maybe it's hard-coded, or maybe it's calculated from your past activity--I dunno), and then adjusted up or down as you start reading it.