Reading speed on computer screens

As I'm pulling together materials for the fourth edition of Writing for the Web, I'm finding it hard to update one important issue.

For decades, it's been a given that reading text on a computer screen is harder than reading it on paper. The effect is that we read online text 25% more slowly than text on paper.

Jakob Nielsen made that critical point back in the 1990s, and said it was a problem with screen resolution. By 2009, he predicted, resolution would be equivalent to print on paper.

But Nielsen hasn't addressed the issue recently, and when I search for other studies, I find little or nothing published since about 2003. Can anyone point me to recent studies that indicate how quickly people read onscreen, using recent computers, compared to reading text on print?

Comments

[Laura]

When I was an editor for Yahoo! I wrote the company's first editorial style guide and used info from Nielsen's study on reading on a computer screen to help justify my recommendations for writers and editors. Last year I was asked to update the style guide and looked for more recent data on reading speeds online, but found nothing beyond the early 2000s. Even Yahoo!'s large in-house usability research dept. had no more up-to-date information. I'm still writing for the Web (and blogging about writing on the Web at http://terriblywrite.wordpress.com). I'll be checking back to see if any of your readers can offer more recent research.