Do You Read E-Books Faster than Print Books?

Photo credit: wck on Flickr

After reading three e-books in a little over the course of a week, it occurred to me that as of late, I’ve developed a tendency of reading more quickly when I use my e-reader. 

To confirm my suspicions, I did some quick math (or rather, had Excel do some quick math) and measured how many days on average it took me to complete an e-book and a print book, using the data Goodreads had from books I’ve read thus far this year. 

I wasn’t surprised to find a big difference between the two. 

On average, it took me 15 days to finish reading a print book. With e-books, however, my average was five days. 

I knew, however, that e-books were sometimes shorter than their print counterparts, so I broke it down further to determine how many pages a day I read on average with each. Again, the difference was undeniable: 46 pages a day with print books, and 79 with e-books. 

What I really found interesting, however, was that if I averaged these statistics with my reading average over the course of a year and a half (ergo, my reading stats from 2012 and this year so far), my averages were much more comparable: it took me an average of 12 days to finish a print book and nine days to complete an e-book. The difference was still there, until I factored in the pages; 59 print pages per day versus 58 pages per day with e-books. 

So what happened between last year and this year? 

For the longest time, I treated my e-reader with as much care as I did my print books. You see, I’m a little OCD when it comes to my beautiful books, and I’ve always been very careful to keep them clean and undamaged. I treated my e-reader much the same, until I started to realize more recently that my little e-reader is sturdier than I gave it credit for. 

Most times I read with my NOOK Simple Touch, so it’s not as delicate as an iPad or tablet. This realization allowed me to start carrying my e-reader around a little more often—I’d prop it up while eating, for example—something I’d never do with a print book, God forbid I got food on it. 

So I suspect that may be part of it, but I think the other part is an active attempt on my part this year to make more use of free moments to read. Combined with the ease of reading off an e-reader (sliding my finger across a screen versus flipping a page, which really shouldn’t be a big deal but it does make for easier single-handed reading), I’ve started to find that on average I breeze through e-books a lot faster than I do their print counterparts. There are exceptions, of course (i.e.: reading The Fault in Our Stars in two days, or Unravel Me in three), but overall, e-books seem to be winning the speed race. 

I don’t know if this is a trend that will continue with me, as it’s something that seems to have really developed over the course of the last six months, but I found it interesting nevertheless. 

And so I’m curious: do you read e-books faster than print? 

Twitter-sized bites: 

One writer's findings when comparing her print and e-book reading statistics. (Click to tweet)  

Print versus e-books—do you read one faster than the other? Join the discussion at @Ava_Jae's blog. (Click to tweet)