![]() 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. Another Kindle setting, the time “left in book” – or “left in chapter” if you prefer fine-tuning – can exacerbate the problem.Ĭonsider my own case. But many people are still insecure about their reading speeds, while others delude themselves that skimming is reading. Nonetheless, here we are in 2020, still reading the way Evelyn Wood promised to disrupt with her “reading revolution” and somehow coping. 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. “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. Yet those who read at normal rates are still easy marks for fraudsters. “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. Schotter, which found little evidence that people can learn to speed-read without sacrificing comprehension. 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. Thank you, Amazon! It’s been known for decades that this is the average adult’s reading speed. Put another way, the typical reader can finish 83% of a Kindle e-page in one minute. 72,000-word) work, the typical reading speed is 250 wpm. Hence, if it takes the typical reader 4 hours and 48 minutes to read the Kindle edition of my 240-page (i.e. But I know the exact word counts for my own books, so I can see that each average Kindle “page” has 300 words. The number of words on a printed page can, of course, vary. Here’s how I converted the typical-time-to-read figures into words per minute. For now, let’s focus on its typical reading times, which were identical for me and other Kindle users I consulted.) (Your own time may vary, and Amazon has an algorithm for that, as I’ll explain later. In each case, Amazon appears to assume that readers, or at least “typical” ones, proceed through text at around 250 words per minute. 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. How about Michelle Obama’s Becoming? Expect to set aside 8 hours and 34 minutes. Planning to read Where the Crawdads Sing on a Kindle? Amazon estimates it will take you 7 hours and 35 minutes. Proof of this can be found in Amazon’s “typical time to read” estimates, available for millions of books published in Kindle editions. Still, almost no one believes in speed-reading anymore. 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. ![]() ![]() I n contrast to this preposterous claim, Kindle’s Typical-Time-to-Read Estimate for The Godfather is 9 hours and 22 minutes ![]()
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