What’s your reading speed?
The other day I read a review of one of my “Jason Dark” books on a blog and it struck me that the reviewer remarked upon the length of these dime novels. He mentioned in his review that it was a short read that took him about an hour to complete. At first I did not think much of it but it stuck with me and a little later I thought about this passing remark a little more.
What bothered me was the fact that it takes me considerably longer to read the books as well as the fact that I would consider a book that offers a mere single hour of entertainment too short. Since I decide upon the price of my dime novels based on the entertainment value I attach to them, the $2.99 sticker price of a “Jason Dark” volume could be considered too high… or maybe not.
The stories in the series are usually around 23,000 words long. If someone reads such a story in an hour it means he has an average reading speed of almost 400 words per minute. If this means nothing to you let me just say that that is pretty fast. I wager that few people can actually read at a speed remotely close to that, especially if you take into consideration all the factors that play into this. In addition, it means that the reviewer read either with full concentration for the entire hour, or that his actual reading speed is even higher but sprinkled with moments of distraction that bring down the average speed. Be that as it may – it remains impressive.
Reading consists of three factors – the speed at which you read the words off a page, the comprehension of the material read and finally, the retention of it, which gets overlooked all too often. This means that even though someone might be able to read the words really fast, he may not be able to pick up the entire meaning of the text – skimming it rather than taking it in really – and in addition, the text that has been read might be forgotten in no time at all.
Sometimes I wish I could read faster – I am a fairly average speed reader – and I’ve been thinking about checking out some of the programs on the web to learn that, but I am honestly afraid that it might affect my comprehension and retention, which I do not wish to sacrifice. In addition, I simply don’t know where to start and how to go about it, but it is something on my mind.
If you want to find out what your own reading speed is, check out this website for a short test. I think it is not really representative, as the sample might be too small and generic, but it will nonetheless give you an idea where you are.
I just took the test a minute ago and my result was a reading speed of 247 words per minute at 100% accuracy, which means it would have taken me at about 2 hours to read the “Jason Dark” story – though I know from real life that even that is not correct, as it typically takes me 3 to 4 hours to read one of the volumes, if not more, given all the real life distractions surrounding us.
In regards to the reviewer mentioned in opening, it is unfortunate that the impression might have been created here that the stories might be excessively short – more like short stories, which they are not. For a casual reader of the review on that blog who might not be familiar with the fact that this reviewer is an incredibly fast reader the impression is undoubtedly one that the books are a whole lot shorter than they really are. A dime novel with 64 pages in print, it will typically offer the casual reader a few hours of enjoyment and with that in mind $2.99 might be the proper price point for them after all.
Quite a bit of variability amongst people. Reading really fast is both a blessing & curse – it allows me to go through an incredible amount of email at work (or read documents quickly) – but leisure reading becomes very expensive. I took this test – got 1200wpm at 100% accuracy. The distribution of reading speeds does have a really long tail…
1200wpm sounds like a machine… seriously, I can definitely see how that could become expensive, useful as it may be in certain instances. Now, if only we could also write at the kind of speed.
1200wpm!! I don’t see how that is possible. That means you can read an entire novel in 1h23m. While I can imagine skim reading at that speed, and being able to extract important information from the text, I would question your ability to actually analyse at any deep level, the information you are reading. For example, if you are reading a book full of emotionally charged material, can you fully comprehend it as well as if you were simple reading a document describing the simple operation of a photocopier?