Reading a book is faster than reading an iBook

Were the readers told not to touch the words to look up the meanings of words they did not know? It sure slows things down if you are looking up words and learning definitions while using that poky technology.

The kindle is a little slower in looking up words due to the lack of the touch screen, but I find I use the feature quite a bit depending upon what I am reading.

Without a standard deviation of the mean or other measure of the dispersion of the results nothing can be said about the statistical significance. On the other hand, who cares about speed when reading a novel?? The question should be x% feels fine reading from a kindle, y% from an ipad, and z% from a regular book.

A study on the reading speed is irrelevant. Reading is not a race, is a pleasurable activity in most cases.
Measure brain waves (type, quantity, etc ...) and what drives the body to read in different devices would be a much more interesting study.

Everyone's brain processes information a little differently. Because of my aging eyes, I can struggle at times with a printed book, finding the sweet spot on the progressives, whereas on my iPad, I can adjust the font size and backlighting to zip thru a book in very little time. We're all a little different.

I'm OCD and I calculate my reading speed statistics when I'm done reading, just to see how fast I was going.

I averaged ~1.2 pages/minute on the iPad, which is roughly the same as on paper. Granted I AM 19, so I'm not as "used" to paper, and, having 15/20 vision, I'm able to use smaller text sizes with no negative impact.

When I'm really really in to a book, I can get as fast as 2.5 pages/minute, which is ridiculous. Only book I really ever did that for was Ender's Game, read it in a few hours one night. Such a good book.

Silly study....reminds me of a parody of USA Today I saw years ago...it had a pie chart showing how much pie people ate: "50% of people eat half the pie...." etc....classic...makes the point about useless graphs and studies...

My highest yearly book total prior to Kindle: 41 books.

My yearly average since reading with a kindle: 62 books.

Me thinks this survey is bogus.

I don't really find this surprising...reading a book or story is a kind of intimate thing. One (generally) sits somewhere comfortable and quiet and suspends reality while absorbing the text. People kind of love and trust Apple products...the idea that the majority of a small, 'ereader friendly' group of people could feel closer to an iPad than a Kindle isn't far fetched at all. Comfort and peace free up the conscious mind and allow the reader to focus only on the words in front of him.

A book, being nothing but ink and paper, is incredibly easy to use. You just have to hold it in front of you and look at it. Any technology hoping to work as well as a book is going to have to have some serious innovation in order to succeed. Every time you need to physically interact with the book, be it turning a page, finding your place, or highlighting a paragraph, is going to lack tactile sensation. Having to look for a button or perform a gesture can never be as freeform as turning a page and each attempt to do this is going to contribue, even if only slightly, to an overall feeling of frustration with the product and detract from the reading experience.

Apple, being on the cutting edge of touchscreen interaction, and being the present day's sort of posterboy of advanced, futuristic, yet functional UIs...it makes sense that they'd have one of the easiest to read ereaders, because it's going to be near effortless to use (but not as effortless as a book).

Hey guys complaining about iBooks Page Animations........... Try tapping the the midpoint of the left or right side of screen. No animation, the next page just appears. So please before you complain about products, try learning how to use them first.

Neilson is a luddite. If he had his way we'd all still be surfing with Gopher. It is absolutely no surprise that he could hand-pick 24 people to confirm what I'm sure were his predetermined conclusions.

That said, I agree with the others that the substance of this "study" is pointless. Yeah, sure, the way we scan and read books might be faster than an e-book. But the ability to carry hundreds of books and magazines and newspapers with me, and the ease with which I can switch books and return to the point where I left off (not to mention the ability to annotate, and to further investigate a topic beyond the confines of the book) make e-reading a very fulfilling activity far beyond some dubious measurement of raw speed.

... unless you're a web 'designer' stuck in 1995.