Kindle’s Down-to-Earth Estimates of Reading Speed

In contrast to this preposterous claim, Kindle’s Typical-Time-to-Read Estimate for The Godfather is 9 hours and 22 minutes

Speed-reading scams still pop up regularly on the internet, and graduates of Evelyn Wood courses often protest, in print or in person, when I call her method a fraud. Still, almost no one believes in speed-reading anymore. Proof of this can be found in Amazon’s “typical time to read” estimates, available for millions of books published in Kindle editions.

Planning to read Where the Crawdads Sing on a Kindle? Amazon estimates it will take you 7 hours and 35 minutes. How about Michelle Obama’s Becoming? Expect to set aside 8 hours and 34 minutes. Or would you rather curl up with The Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence? Prepare to block out 7 hours and 50 minutes.

In each case, Amazon appears to assume that readers, or at least “typical” ones, proceed through text at around 250 words per minute. (Your own time may vary, and Amazon has an algorithm for that, as I’ll explain later. For now, let’s focus on its typical reading times, which were identical for me and other Kindle users I consulted.)  

Here’s how I converted the typical-time-to-read figures into words per minute. The number of words on a printed page can, of course, vary. But I know the exact word counts for my own books, so I can see that each average Kindle “page” has 300 words. Hence, if it takes the typical reader 4 hours and 48 minutes to read the Kindle edition of my 240-page (i.e. 72,000-word) work, the typical reading speed is 250 wpm. Put another way, the typical reader can finish 83% of a Kindle e-page in one minute.

Thank you, Amazon! It’s been known for decades that this is the average adult’s reading speed. Given the limitations of eye anatomy and the time required to process words into meaning, “college-educated adults who are considered good readers usually move along at about 200 to 400 wpm,” according to a 2016 study co-authored by University of South Florida professor Elizabeth R. Schotter, which found little evidence that people can learn to speed-read without sacrificing comprehension.

“Whoever claims to be a speed-reader is likely skimming,” Schotter has said, adding that Evelyn Wood’s claims were “crazy, based on the scientific evidence on reading.”

Eric Spitznagel, “How a Mormon Housewife Sold America the Big Speed-Reading Scam,” New York Post, Sep. 21, 2019

Yet those who read at normal rates are still easy marks for fraudsters. The shaming is powerful — and shameful. “It’s No Longer a 250-Word-Per-Minute World,” warned the headline of a 1967 Newsweek wire service story that ran in scores of newspapers. A decade earlier – even before Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics opened its first Washington institute – a Purdue University reading “expert” declared that those reading under 500 wpm were “handicapped” in the business world.

Nonetheless, here we are in 2020, still reading the way Evelyn Wood promised to disrupt with her “reading revolution” and somehow coping. But many people are still insecure about their reading speeds, while others delude themselves that skimming is reading. Another Kindle setting, the time “left in book” – or “left in chapter” if you prefer fine-tuning – can exacerbate the problem.

Consider my own case. With two days left before a meeting of my book club, I’m only a few chapters into Sonia Purcell’s excellent book, A Woman of No Importance. Consulting the menu at the top of my Kindle screen for information about the book, I find that the typical time to read this book – 368 pages – is 9 hours and 34 minutes. But because I’ve activated “time left in book” in my display settings, I can see that one of Amazon’s mysterious algorithms has me marked as a faster-than-average reader. As I start the book, I see at the foot of the screen that my time left is 5 hours and 1 minute. Yes, Amazon has it worked out to the minute.

Hence, according to Amazon’s secret sauce, I personally can polish this particular book off at about 370 wpm. Yet the typical time to read, found in the About This Book menu, works out to 192 wpm. That unusually slow “typical” rate might be based on the difficulty of the book. Purnell did a staggering amount of research, and the text is unusually dense with information.

According to Amazon, the “time left” algorithm takes a number of factors into consideration. According to the company, which responded to my emailed questions, these factors including the type of book and words per page, as well as your own previous reading sessions. I’m not sure how “words per page” factors in, since the user can choose how to display the font, page-turning requires but a tap, and Kindle’s page numbering (visible if activated on the Display menu) always calculates 300 words per page.

As for the type of book, it’s arguable that Purnell’s book is more challenging than many. However, Amazon’s typical-time-to-read figures suggest that my own university press book, Popovers and Candlelight: Patricia Murphy and the Rise and Fall of a Restaurant Empire, is a tougher slog than Scan Artist. They are about the same length in their Kindle editions, yet Amazon thinks Popovers takes the typical reader about two hours longer to finish. As the author, I can confidently state that this is untrue. Academic publishing does not necessarily indicate academic language.

But let’s go back to my book-club deadline. As I progressed through A Woman of No Importance, I must have quickly fallen short of Amazon’s expectations. The part of their algorithm based on my previous reading might have been skewed by my secret vice: Catherine Cookson novels. I love Cookson for recreational reading, but though meant for adults, her books are on the YA level. Many are part of a series, in which the beginning of each book is the recap of the previous one, allowing me to read them relatively quickly – though never approaching the rates claimed by self-described speed-readers.

As I plodded through Purnell’s absorbing but challenging text, my Kindle seemed to sense that I was failing to achieve my Cookson speed. The “time left” in the toolbar barely budged. I felt as though I were driving with GPS and repeatedly making wrong turns that triggered recalibration. With my Kindle warning me that I had more than an hour left in the book – a prophecy that proved true – I left for my meeting and came clean with my clubmates. I hadn’t finished it.

Would that slow-moving read-o-meter have helped me with college all-nighters? No, I found it crazy-making. It might have made me more susceptible to offers of amphetamines, or to the false promises of speed-read scams.

So leave that personalized “time left” setting off. No one enjoys reading against a clock. But take heart from the typical times to read, which Amazon doesn’t use as a selling point. Lots of other information about the book, the number of pages, and the author can be accessed on its website, but a book, or at least a sample, must be downloaded to access its “typical” time.

If you’ve already got some downloads, take a look at the typical stats. Remember, this measure has nothing to do with you, or even with rates clocked on other people’s Kindles. (Again, speeds stored in your Kindle stay in your Kindle.) From the first day of my books’ releases, their typical times were available. Obviously, they’re based on the human-scale average rates, agreed on by researchers before and after Evelyn Wood. Contrasting them with claims made by Evelyn Wood and her followers, we find:

We could put a man on the moon, but . . .

We’ve come a long way from self-delusion — or at least some of us have. Reading, which involves thinking, takes time. May you and I resolve to leave sufficient time to prepare for our classes, law cases, presentations, and book clubs. We’re only mortal, Evelyn.

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