Lies, Damned Lies, and E-Book Statistics →

I was surprised to see a fair amount of coverage this weekend in mainstream news channels of Jakob Nielsen’s recent study on iPad and Kindle reading speeds which concluded people read content on paper faster than content on e-readers:

The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle measured at 10.7% slower than print. However, the difference between the two devices was not statistically significant because of the data’s fairly high variability. Thus, the only fair conclusion is that we can’t say for sure which device offers the fastest reading speed. In any case, the difference would be so small that it wouldn’t be a reason to buy one over the other. But we can say that tablets still haven’t beaten the printed book: the difference between Kindle and the book was significant at the p<.01 level, and the difference between iPad and the book was marginally significant at p=.06.

Interesting, but I am not really sure there is a lot of news here.  For one, the e-book champion will find a lot of angles to nitpick at the study.  A few obvious ones: the sample size (24 participants) is very small; the study compares a behavior with years and years of reinforcement to one that is newly learned; and e-reader user interfaces will be improving so rapidly that the conclusions will likely have a very short shelf-life.

Those points however, are insignificant in comparison to another, much more important idea.  Assuming the same level of comprehension, what is meaningful is not how fast you read, but how much you read.  In my unscientific observation, people who own e-readers read much, much more frequently than those who don’t. If you read a passage in 53 seconds on paper versus someone else’s 60 seconds on the Kindle, but they are reading two books a month to your two books a year, who is getting the larger benefit from reading?  That’s the reading edge that matters.

Tagged as: e-books, ipad, kindle