• Home
  • /
  • Books
  • /
  • 6 Tips for Increasing Your Speed as an E-Book Reader

6 Tips for Increasing Your Speed as an E-Book Reader

speed-limitWith school back in session and millions of today’s students using e-books in the classroom, versus traditional books, it’s a good time to talk about speed-reading. Even if you aren’t a student or are only reading for pleasure, there are only so many minutes in the day and you may want to know how to become a faster reader. Then again, you may not be interested in speedy reading, because you don’t see it as a race or a competition. You just want to enjoy what you read and retain more of it as you read. Whatever kind of e-book reader you happen to be, these tips will be helpful, fun, and interesting.

#1 How Fast Do Most Adults Read?

Everybody reads at their own pace, but most research agrees that the average reader will cover about 250 to 300 words per minute. Comparing that to the average rate of speech for most people, which is around 100-125 words per minutes, it’s interesting to see that we can read about two or three times faster than we can talk. One reason that might interest you, if you are an avid e-reader who also enjoys digital downloads of audio books, is that knowing those statistics can help you figure out whether you want read your next book or listen to someone else read it to you – based on how fast you want to get through the text.

#2 How Fast Do You Read?

What is your particular reading speed? An easy way to find out approximately how fast you read – and how that compares to the reading skills of other people – is to take a reading test. There is one that is free to use and only takes about one minute to complete, that you can experiment with it by going to a website sponsored by the big office supply chain, Staples. After you take the test it will give you the results, and if you continue reading there is also a nifty little guide in the form of a bar chart that provides information about how long various e-reader devices hold a charge before needing to be recharged.

Here’s the link:

http://www.staples.com/sbd/cre/marketing/technology-research-centers/ereaders/speed-reader/index.html

#3 Customize Text to Your Personal Reading Needs

Most of today’s e-readers, especially the hot sellers like the Kindle and the Nook, allow you to customize the view of the text that you are reading. Doing so has the potential to improve your reader experience, including how fast you can comfortably read while still understanding and retaining what you read. The easiest way to enhance that, and boost your reading performance, is to change and/or enlarge the font of the text. Oftentimes boosting the font from a size of 10 or 11, for example, to a size of 12 or 14,  will make it look magnified. So if you wear the kind of simple reading glasses that you can buy over-the-counter in drug stores and department stores, changing the font to a slighter larger and more readable size may improve the view enough for you to put away the glasses.

#4 Determine Your Reading Goal

How fast you read, however, is also dependent upon your own personal goals and objectives. If you are scanning through an article or a chapter to just learn the big, main points, then careful reading of each word and sentence may not be necessary. Skimming the text to read as quickly as you can and just pick up the “bullet points” may be your goal. But what if you are simply reading for pleasure? Or what if  you are an aspiring author, who is reading to learn about the mechanics of writing – the sentence structure, grammatical usage, and style, for instance, of one of your favorite writers? In that case you may not be concerned with how long it takes to read a page because you are most focused on dissecting and analyzing the writing. So always think about reading speed within the specific and unique context of your own personal needs and preferences.

#5 Boost Your Retention Rate

Oftentimes, we are reading to learn and to acquire new knowledge that we will retain and not simply forget as soon as we put down the e-book. Retaining or remembering what you read is essential in that case, and that’s why students need to emphasize reading that includes comprehension and retention – not just lightning fast speed. To boost your rate of retention, highlight the main points so you can scan the text later and go right to them. The same goes for making margin notes about the key points in the text. Many e-reader devices or e-reader apps have software features that allow you to do this electronically, right on the page, the way you might do while reading a traditional textbook.

#6 A Great Homework Reading Tip

No matter how you read or take notes, one of the best ways to ensure that you recall what you have read or studied is to review it within an hour of reading it. So if you read a chapter or take lecture notes for school, for example, and wait until the next day to review that material, you won’t retain as effectively as you would if you did your review within an hour or two of getting out of class. That applies to almost any knowledge you acquire. If you review it or practice it within a short time, your memory will grab hold of it and retain it better than it will if a lot of time goes by between acquiring the knowledge and reviewing it.

Share Article:

free-ebooks

Free-Ebooks.net Blog

All Posts

1 Comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Welcome to the Free eBooks Blog!

Discover 1000’s of New Authors in Hundreds of Categories, Fiction and Non-Fiction – Free Every Month!

Follow On Instagram

True Stories
Dystopian Stories
For Youth

Three Proud Women is a fiction and alternate history novel which is the sequel to my And An Angel Sang. It tells the continuing adventures of three outstanding women…

 
Edit Template