Neil Gupta
 

Calculating Reading Time

130 words • 1 minute to read

There’s a useful little shell command posted here to calculate the reading time of a text selection based on the average reading speed.

Such a simple feature got me thinking about all the places this could be used, like RSS readers or Instapaper to let me filter my articles based on the amount of time I have.

The most useful place I’d love to see this implemented is in my email client, such that it warns me if I am sending an email that will take longer than 30 seconds to read. That would be a great way to finally encourage people to send shorter emails.

Update: I threw together a quick Safari extension based on the above idea for Gmail. You can get it from GitHub.

Written on June 4, 2011 in San Jose.