Flutterby™! : Book vs. eReader

Jakob Neilsen just released some preliminary results from a controlled study of reading speeds on the iPad, Kindle, PC and books. The net result: the test subjects were able to read from books faster than the other platforms. I haven't had any quality time with an eReader yet but I can definitely agree with the PC vs. book results. That is, reading long text on a PC sucks. Also, PC World covered the research and demonstrated their statistical illiteracy:

Interestingly, Nielsen's results appear to show that reading on the iPad is significantly faster compared to the Kindle 2. But Nielsen was quick to dismiss this conclusion arguing that the reading speeds between the two devices were "not statistically significant." "The difference [between reading times on the iPad and Kindle 2] would be so small that it wouldn't be a reason to buy one over the other," Nielsen wrote.

Non-ordinal statistics cannot be used to determine ordination if the values are not statistically significant. That is, it is meaningless to say "the iPad is significantly faster than the Kindle 2" because the values do not denote rank without statistical significance. This is why scientists don't like to release raw data.