Reading speed

[Waylander]

Maybe because it assumes people at college/university level education automatically read faster because they have more material to cover, and have learnt to speed/skim read effectively, and still retain information? Otherwise I don't know.

[meeera]

I was expecting a whole lot more pages in the test. I think that reading a single page in isolation, with no context, doesn't necessarily tell you much about how fast/well you can read multiple connected pages.

[Jessica Lares]

300, and I'm a college student. I agree it's not a very good test.

"You read 206 words per minute.
That makes you 18% slower than the national average."

It would take me 47 hours and 31 minutes to read Tolstoy's War & Peace.

Ah, well. There's no failings regarding my reading comprehension, at least, and I'm not a competitive reader in any case. I don't mind taking a little longer than the average bear to complete a task I find pleasurable.

[jersysman]

I read at 344 words a minute, which seems just about right for me.

[Soldim]

Originally Posted by Atunah

I did 3 times just to see. I had a bit of a harder time reading on my netbook screen, but I did get all three answers right each time. I had I think it was 550 or so words the first time and the other two in the 520's.

....

I do know that I have a much easier time to read on e-ink with my eyes than on the computer screen. Even such a short text makes my eyes all wonky.

I fully agree with that, it is certainly much easier to read on e-ink. Additionally, once you are into a book generally you'll read slightly faster because there's somewhat of a logic flow (lets ignore Joyce ). For the excerpts in the test it is a lot harder, because there's no preceding context. I'd think most people would need to read the first two or three sentences twice to get a feel.

[Victoria]

448 wpm - average college student. I answered the questions correctly, and I didn't rush. But it felt like my pace for 'work' reading ( vs work skimming, which has to be much faster)

I don't see the allure of reading fast, when reading for pleasure. It's fun to savour books, pause to visualize the scene; or just enjoy a great turn of phrase. For me, when it comes to reading, less equals more.

[lol.systema]

377 wpm
Low level 11th grade student. Holy sh** /:

can't blame anyone for it. I got in a military high school academy and reading was the least prioritized activity in the school's curriculum. Guess I'm up to start getting to read more in less time

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Something is fishy here.

Hm... fishyness.

I used Del Rey paperbacks to count the number of characters on a page. They use around 2400.

Obviously, the Count Pages plugin does not take images, whitespace or margins into account. It just counts characters, assuming the book is a huge wall of text. Obviously, the e-book will therefore have somewhat less "pages" than the paperback version.

Now, to compare... I have a series of books that is almost 12.000 pages in paper. However, with my method of counting, it's 8,326 pages in e-book form.

It means that, if reading these books in paper, I'd be reading 1.34x the number of extra pages compared to the e-book version.

So, reading 30 "pages" an hour on my Kindle compares to reading 40 pages an hour in paper. 400 words per page, 40 pages, makes 16.000 words per hour, or 267 wpm. It's closer to the outcome of the test, but they're still far apart.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Hm... fishyness.

I used Del Rey paperbacks to count the number of characters on a page. They use around 2400.

Obviously, the Count Pages plugin does not take images, whitespace or margins into account. It just counts characters, assuming the book is a huge wall of text. Obviously, the e-book will therefore have somewhat less "pages" than the paperback version.

Now, to compare... I have a series of books that is almost 12.000 pages in paper. However, with my method of counting, it's 8,326 pages in e-book form.

It means that, if reading these books in paper, I'd be reading 1.34x the number of extra pages compared to the e-book version.

So, reading 30 "pages" an hour on my Kindle compares to reading 40 pages an hour in paper. 400 words per page, 40 pages, makes 16.000 words per hour, or 267 wpm. It's closer to the outcome of the test, but they're still far apart.

...And this line of reasoning only holds true for books that have a large number of images. Whitespace and margins shouldn't matter, really--if there is 2400 characters on a typical page in a paperback, then it should be the same, since there are margins and whitespace in a paperback, too. A large number of images would make a difference, of course.

Shari

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by shalym

...And this line of reasoning only holds true for books that have a large number of images. Whitespace and margins shouldn't matter, really--if there is 2400 characters on a typical page in a paperback, then it should be the same, since there are margins and whitespace in a paperback, too. A large number of images would make a difference, of course.

Shari

Whitespace and margins do matter a lot.

If one chapter ends halfway down the left page, and the next starts halfway down the right page, a paper book will have "lost" an entire page. If the book is printed with a lot of margin (my paper version of Lord of the Rings is huge, as it has about 4/5th of an inch of margins all around the text), it will use more pages.

The Count Pages plugin cannot take this into account. It just counts characters, and that's it. Therefore it behaves as if the book is printed as a wall of text with zero margins, no whitespace between chapters; not even indentations for paragraphs.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Whitespace and margins do matter a lot.

If one chapter ends halfway down the left page, and the next starts halfway down the right page, a paper book will have "lost" an entire page. If the book is printed with more margin (my paper version of Lord of the Rings is huge, as it has about 4/5th of an inch margins all around the text), it will use more pages.

The Count Pages plugin cannot take this into account. It just counts characters, and that's it. Therefore it behaves as if the book is printed as a wall of text with zero margins, no whitespace between chapters; not even indentations for paragraphs.

Ah...sorry then--I didn't realize that. So I guess it's only useful as a relative measurement for while you're reading then, correct? So that you can see something like "page 200 of 550" or something like that? It would appear that it is not much good if you are trying to compare it to the paper version of the book.

Shari

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by shalym

Ah...sorry then--I didn't realize that. So I guess it's only useful as a relative measurement for while you're reading then, correct? So that you can see something like "page 200 of 550" or something like that? It would appear that it is not much good if you are trying to compare it to the paper version of the book.

Shari

Yes, correct. I just counted the characters on a few pages in different Del Rey books (I had a lot of them, as they print a lot of Fantasy), took the average, and came close to 2400, so I set the Count Pages to that number.

That way, I get e-books with a "normal" page count, which is quite close to a Del Rey paperback; normally within +/- 10%. A 500 page paperback will become something like a 450-500 page e-book. (I don't like the page counting many e-readers do. Some novella's that are 120 pages in paper, become behemoth "books" of 750 pages... that's the reason why I rely on the Count Pages plugin.)

When counting all the books the same way, and a 350 "page" e-book will take me around 8 hours to read, I know that a 700 "page" e-book will take me around 16 hours. Obviously, the page numbers can tell you where you are in a book, but you can also envision the "thickness" of one book compared to another, and to some extent, to a paperback.

I just don't like it if I'm thinking "I want a quick read between these two books", and then inadvertently pick a book that would be 1000 pages long in paper.

[Ketan1234]

Thanks for Fast Access speed of your book it was Great

[Nabodita]

I used to think I read fast. Now I know I don't. 571 words a minute? Pretty much accurate for me though. The time for Harry Potter was about right. Although I've read all the books listed except The Colour Purple and Slaughterhouse-Five, can't really recall how long it took me to read each book!

I'm actually embarrassed.