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Comment by SlyShy | Hacker News Reader

Glad I'm not the only one who thought many of the popular iPad applications were silly.

The Average Reading Time idea is intriguing, however, I don't expect it to be of much use. Reading time varies vastly depending on the material. Nobody reads a journal article at the same pace as a novel, for instance.

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Average Reading Time certainly seems like something you would have to try if you want to find out whether it’s useful.

They should also drop the pseudo accuracy. Telling me the time down to the second (or are those minutes – hm, another source of confusion) seems ridiculous.

It knows how quickly you change/scroll through pages while you read, so it can make a reasonable assumption of the number of words you read per minute and create an estimation that way.

Yes and no. I've tried this sort of thing before, and obviously the machine can't know when you are actually reading a paragraph slowly or when you've just been distracted. It would have to be clever about weighting an overall average with a short term average. I'll be curious to see how they do it, definitely.

Good points. Given enough data it could do a decent job at normalizing lows & highs, enough to be useful anyway.

It would be interesting to see a proximity sensor in the iPad. I'm not sure what the range of those is. The accelerometer might be sensitive enough to detect when it's being held up as it's going to move a little bit in your hand.

It says: "To find your average reading time all you need is taking a two minute test reading into one of the texts in the app and you’re set."

Yeah, that's where I went from "this could be useful" to "that's stupid". It's like doing an internet speed test to determine how long it will take to download a file, ignoring how fast the file has actually been downloading.

It's called calibration.

It's one thing to calibrate, it's another to rely on context-sensitive data and pretend it is universal, when instead you can just rely on the context-specific data for any specific context and refine the estimates as you go. To my knowledge, web browsers do not "calibrate" like this.

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