Reading at the Speed of Print

This is interesting:

People can read traditional printed books a good bit faster than eBooks on tablet computers, a new study has found.

The study tested peoples’ pace of reading on two popular e-reader tablets – Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle 2 – as well as a standard PC monitor and a plain ol’ regular book.

The test used some Hemingway stories, which took on average more than 17 minutes to read.

To make sure people did not just skim the stories, the participants were given a reading comprehension tests afterward.

Overall, the study revealed that people read text 6.2 percent slower on an iPad than on the printed page. With the Kindle, reading was 10.7 percent slower.

Nielsen noted that this difference between the e-readers was not statistically significant, however, so in the end the only fair statement is that “tablets still haven’t beaten the printed book,” Nielsen wrote.