3 ms·

"240 minutes a month which is enough to finish 1-2 books" this number stands out to me ! maybe i am slow reader but .5-1 seems more realistic

wccrawford 2y ago
It depends on the books. I read a lot of fiction, and it's been a long time since I read a book that could be read in 2 hours. But I've had a few lately that came close.
dgfitz 2y ago
8 minutes a day is very specific and I struggle with that, maybe it’s an average? Do they have the exact same schedule all days of the week? How big are the books? Are they “junk food” books or dense? All subject matter or strictly sci-fi or whatever? I’m a big reader. Reading for 8 minutes at a time would either be a whole chapter or half a page depending on the book.
stevenwoo 2y ago
Judging by length of audiobooks, four hours is the length of the novella long essay A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld adaptations all come in around 9-10 hours and those are short books that require my full attention due to the wordplay and setup for jokes sometimes being longish. One would have to double the speed and sacrifice comprehension to meet this goal. I had to listen to first hour of some Greg Egan book and the glossary about ten times before I grokked it.
- kristianp 2y ago
  That raises the question: how much faster can we read without speaking, than read aloud? I'm guessing its a number less than 2 times.
  - soperj 2y ago
    I can definitely read 4 times faster in my head than out loud. I've read books to my kid out loud that take like 30 minutes per chapter, and i doubt it would take more than an hour to read the whole book. I read on the faster side though, and don't have an internal monologue.
    - nicce 2y ago
      I can also read about the same speed but I don’t enjoy reading at that speed at all...
  - ta2112 2y ago
    For me it's 1:1. I read aloud in my head at the same pace that I speak. It seems slow, but little by little I get through what I need. Also, I don't know how to do it another way. So it goes.
  - stevenwoo 2y ago
    It depends upon the material for me. Sometimes with technical or historical books that are essentially reciting data points then conclusions I can read much faster than 2x because if one is paying attention one kind of knows where the writer(s) are going - though I might repeat or pause to write notes or do online research sometimes to memorize and understand new terminology, but for fiction I have to be in a very specific mindset to imagine all the things going on appropriately with movement and emotion and pondering character motivation and the setting, sometimes I just pause and think about what is being described in my minds eye before moving forward in the text.
  - aidenn0 2y ago
    My wife asked me this question, since I'm a considerably faster reader than her. We discovered that (if I try reading aloud as fast as possible) I can read aloud faster than she can read without speaking, though my tongue does occasionally trip over words at that speed. I read in my head faster yet.
  - alwa 2y ago
    Oh man. I’d go higher. Especially compared to vocalizing at “storytelling pace.” I remember a while back being surprised to learn that there are readers who process language phonographically as opposed to orthographically, even when silent-reading. That is, they might read in their minds at the same pace that they speak, or “subvocalize”—reading aloud in everything except for producing the sounds. It was a dinner-party-grade conversation, not an academic-grade one, but once somebody talked to me about that distinction I’d notice people mouthing along to what they were reading—and it made sense why that was slower. I’m not up on the details, but I remember an estimate in the 150-200wpm range for reading out loud. A little north of that for silent reading with subvocalization, and comfortably in the 400-600wpm range for skilled silent readers in an orthographic mode. And then the whole “speed reading” crowd clocking in faster, but at significant cost to comprehension. The general idea being that skilled orthographic readers can “chunk” entire words and phrases into larger visual units that they can parse all at once. Looking for references now this is the best I can find: https://theamericanscholar.org/reading-fast-and-slow/ https://theamericanscholar.org/reading-fast-and-slow/ But I wonder where the speed reading conversation intersects with this notion out of Caltech that we “live at 10 bits per second”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42449602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42449602
- aidenn0 2y ago
  I read light prose several times faster than an audio book; 60-100 pages in an hour for a typical paperback. That works out to 240-400 pages for the author's 240 minutes. I read Going Postal by Pratchett in under 4 hours. [edit] Also, consumers of audiobooks may turn the speed up. My wife listens at 1.25-1.5x speed, depending on the narrator's pace.
  - wholinator2 2y ago
    How do you do that? Are you hearing the words out loud in your head? Is every sentence being parsed? Or is it like touch typing where you're hitting just close enough to get meaning but not enough to go deep? Also, what is light prose? Is it just something you don't care too much about extracting meaning from?
    - maxfurman 2y ago
      Some books are easier to read than others. They use more common words, or contain a more traditional narrative that is easy to understand, or both.
    - aidenn0 2y ago
      > How do you do that? Are you hearing the words out loud in your head? Is every sentence being parsed? Yes, I still have an internal voice when I read (and when I touch type for that matter). > Also, what is light prose? Is it just something you don't care too much about extracting meaning from? - The words are familiar (a counterexample would be any work written in Elizabethan English, since I'll trip over archaic word meanings) - The organization is such as to make for easy understanding what is happening. Some authors do the opposite as a literary device; highly non-linear works or an extremely unreliably narrator are counterexamples. This does not exclude allegory. Arthur Miller's The Cruicible is a straightforward dramatization of a story in colonial Salem, but is rather transparently an allegory for McCarthyism. I think that extracting meaning is largely orthogonal to whether prose is light or not. Certainly many important works are intentionally dense, but there's also overly pretentious drivel dressed up in hard-to-understand clothing.
    - watwut 2y ago
soupfordummies 2y ago
Yeah a minute a page is a decent equivalence depending on the book and reading speed. 240 pages is still a rather short book. A book a month ain't bad though!
o11c 2y ago
I've tested myself several times and found I can usually read 1.5 to 3 pages per minute for a typical-size paperback, depending mostly on how "in the zone" I am (with a minor effect from complexity, but most published novels don't different much in reading level). Even down at 1 page per minute, there are plenty of 200-page books so 1 is a reasonable lower bound. Except, the article spreading it out to only 8 minutes per day means you'll never be reading long enough to get in the zone, so ... One notable observation: you need to aggressively prune away the possibility of reading anything with bad (or even inconsistent) grammar; exposure to it poisons your brain's ability to read and write correctly.
asdf6969 2y ago
Stands out to me too. I’m usually at 1-2 pages per minute when I’m focused and reading something easier but long non-fiction is more like 240 minutes for 10% of the book

wccrawford 2y ago

It depends on the books. I read a lot of fiction, and it's been a long time since I read a book that could be read in 2 hours. But I've had a few lately that came close.

dgfitz 2y ago

8 minutes a day is very specific and I struggle with that, maybe it’s an average? Do they have the exact same schedule all days of the week? How big are the books? Are they “junk food” books or dense? All subject matter or strictly sci-fi or whatever? I’m a big reader. Reading for 8 minutes at a time would either be a whole chapter or half a page depending on the book.

stevenwoo 2y ago

Judging by length of audiobooks, four hours is the length of the novella long essay A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld adaptations all come in around 9-10 hours and those are short books that require my full attention due to the wordplay and setup for jokes sometimes being longish. One would have to double the speed and sacrifice comprehension to meet this goal. I had to listen to first hour of some Greg Egan book and the glossary about ten times before I grokked it.

kristianp 2y ago
That raises the question: how much faster can we read without speaking, than read aloud? I'm guessing its a number less than 2 times.
- soperj 2y ago
  I can definitely read 4 times faster in my head than out loud. I've read books to my kid out loud that take like 30 minutes per chapter, and i doubt it would take more than an hour to read the whole book. I read on the faster side though, and don't have an internal monologue.
  - nicce 2y ago
    I can also read about the same speed but I don’t enjoy reading at that speed at all...
- ta2112 2y ago
  For me it's 1:1. I read aloud in my head at the same pace that I speak. It seems slow, but little by little I get through what I need. Also, I don't know how to do it another way. So it goes.
- stevenwoo 2y ago
  It depends upon the material for me. Sometimes with technical or historical books that are essentially reciting data points then conclusions I can read much faster than 2x because if one is paying attention one kind of knows where the writer(s) are going - though I might repeat or pause to write notes or do online research sometimes to memorize and understand new terminology, but for fiction I have to be in a very specific mindset to imagine all the things going on appropriately with movement and emotion and pondering character motivation and the setting, sometimes I just pause and think about what is being described in my minds eye before moving forward in the text.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  My wife asked me this question, since I'm a considerably faster reader than her. We discovered that (if I try reading aloud as fast as possible) I can read aloud faster than she can read without speaking, though my tongue does occasionally trip over words at that speed. I read in my head faster yet.
- alwa 2y ago
  Oh man. I’d go higher. Especially compared to vocalizing at “storytelling pace.” I remember a while back being surprised to learn that there are readers who process language phonographically as opposed to orthographically, even when silent-reading. That is, they might read in their minds at the same pace that they speak, or “subvocalize”—reading aloud in everything except for producing the sounds. It was a dinner-party-grade conversation, not an academic-grade one, but once somebody talked to me about that distinction I’d notice people mouthing along to what they were reading—and it made sense why that was slower. I’m not up on the details, but I remember an estimate in the 150-200wpm range for reading out loud. A little north of that for silent reading with subvocalization, and comfortably in the 400-600wpm range for skilled silent readers in an orthographic mode. And then the whole “speed reading” crowd clocking in faster, but at significant cost to comprehension. The general idea being that skilled orthographic readers can “chunk” entire words and phrases into larger visual units that they can parse all at once. Looking for references now this is the best I can find: https://theamericanscholar.org/reading-fast-and-slow/ https://theamericanscholar.org/reading-fast-and-slow/ But I wonder where the speed reading conversation intersects with this notion out of Caltech that we “live at 10 bits per second”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42449602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42449602
aidenn0 2y ago
I read light prose several times faster than an audio book; 60-100 pages in an hour for a typical paperback. That works out to 240-400 pages for the author's 240 minutes. I read Going Postal by Pratchett in under 4 hours. [edit] Also, consumers of audiobooks may turn the speed up. My wife listens at 1.25-1.5x speed, depending on the narrator's pace.
- wholinator2 2y ago
  How do you do that? Are you hearing the words out loud in your head? Is every sentence being parsed? Or is it like touch typing where you're hitting just close enough to get meaning but not enough to go deep? Also, what is light prose? Is it just something you don't care too much about extracting meaning from?
  - maxfurman 2y ago
    Some books are easier to read than others. They use more common words, or contain a more traditional narrative that is easy to understand, or both.
  - aidenn0 2y ago
    > How do you do that? Are you hearing the words out loud in your head? Is every sentence being parsed? Yes, I still have an internal voice when I read (and when I touch type for that matter). > Also, what is light prose? Is it just something you don't care too much about extracting meaning from? - The words are familiar (a counterexample would be any work written in Elizabethan English, since I'll trip over archaic word meanings) - The organization is such as to make for easy understanding what is happening. Some authors do the opposite as a literary device; highly non-linear works or an extremely unreliably narrator are counterexamples. This does not exclude allegory. Arthur Miller's The Cruicible is a straightforward dramatization of a story in colonial Salem, but is rather transparently an allegory for McCarthyism. I think that extracting meaning is largely orthogonal to whether prose is light or not. Certainly many important works are intentionally dense, but there's also overly pretentious drivel dressed up in hard-to-understand clothing.
  - watwut 2y ago

soupfordummies 2y ago

Yeah a minute a page is a decent equivalence depending on the book and reading speed. 240 pages is still a rather short book. A book a month ain't bad though!

o11c 2y ago

I've tested myself several times and found I can usually read 1.5 to 3 pages per minute for a typical-size paperback, depending mostly on how "in the zone" I am (with a minor effect from complexity, but most published novels don't different much in reading level). Even down at 1 page per minute, there are plenty of 200-page books so 1 is a reasonable lower bound. Except, the article spreading it out to only 8 minutes per day means you'll never be reading long enough to get in the zone, so ... One notable observation: you need to aggressively prune away the possibility of reading anything with bad (or even inconsistent) grammar; exposure to it poisons your brain's ability to read and write correctly.

asdf6969 2y ago

Stands out to me too. I’m usually at 1-2 pages per minute when I’m focused and reading something easier but long non-fiction is more like 240 minutes for 10% of the book