A stopwatch for silent reading with a rate counter attached. Press Start, read, press Pause when the phone buzzes, and watch the clock run in hours, minutes and seconds alongside two numbers: pages read so far and pages per hour.
It is for the reading block nobody else can interrupt, the forty minutes before a seminar where you have to get through four chapters, and for anyone who has ever finished a book on a Sunday and could not say how long it took. Knowing your real rate makes the next reading list less of a guess.
A timer for silent reading sessions with page tracking. See how many pages you read per hour.
How it works
The main button cycles through three labels. Start begins the count and flips the label to Pause, Pause freezes the clock and flips it to Resume, and Resume picks up from where the seconds stopped. Reset puts the clock back to 00:00:00, clears the page count and returns the button to Start.
The display shows whether you are Reading or Paused, so a glance tells you if the clock is still running while you answer a message. Under that sit the two stats. Pages Read is whatever page count you have entered, and Pages Hour is that count divided by the hours that have actually elapsed, shown to one decimal place.
The rate only appears once there is time on the clock. At zero seconds it reads 0.0 rather than dividing by nothing, and it recalculates every second after that, so you can watch the number settle as the session goes on.
A worked example
You sit down at 02:00 PM and read until 02:45 PM, and you finish page 24. That is 45 minutes, which is 0.75 of an hour. Pages per hour is 24 divided by 0.75, so the display reads 32.0. For a 300 page book, 32 pages an hour means about 9 and a half hours of reading, which is genuinely useful information before you tell someone you will finish it by Friday.
Now a shorter check. Twenty minutes on the clock, page 10 reached. Twenty minutes is 0.333 of an hour, and 10 divided by 0.333 gives 30.0 pages per hour, very close to the first session even though the two runs were different lengths.
Watch the early minutes though. One page in sixty seconds shows 60.0 pages per hour, because a single page extrapolated over an hour looks absurd. The number calms down once you have ten or fifteen minutes in, so read the rate at the end of a session rather than in the first minute of one.
Honest limits
Pages per hour only means something if the pages are similar. A dense statistics textbook page and a novel page are not the same unit of work, so compare sessions of the same book rather than across books. It also says nothing about whether you understood any of it. Thirty two pages skimmed and forgotten is a worse evening than twelve pages read properly and retold from memory afterwards.
The clock measures open tab time, not attention. If you pause and forget to resume, your rate drops, and if you leave it running while you make coffee, the rate drops too. Both are your call, but know which one happened before you draw conclusions about your reading speed.
- Pause during interruptions. Otherwise the coffee break counts as reading time and drags your rate down.
- Update the page count as you go. Reconstructing it at the end from memory is how off-by-ten errors happen.
- Same book, same conditions. Rates are only comparable within one book.
- Nothing is stored. Write the final number down if you want a history.
Other tools
- Speech Length Calculator – how long your words will take out loud
- Stretch Break Timer – movement breaks between long reading blocks
- Toothbrushing Timer – two minutes, four quadrants, no shortcuts
Frequently asked questions
How do I stop the timer without losing my count?
Press Pause. The clock freezes, the phase label changes to Paused, and the page count and rate stay exactly where they were. Press Resume to carry on, or Reset if you want to start a fresh session from 00:00:00.
What does pages per hour actually count?
Pages read divided by the time on the clock, with the time converted from seconds into hours first. It is a simple average over the whole session, so it does not weight the parts where you were flying or stuck. That is usually fine, and it is why long sessions give a steadier number than short ones.
Is a higher rate always better?
No. Speed without recall is wasted. If you are reading to answer questions later, check yourself after the session, and treat the rate as a measure of how the material is flowing rather than a target to beat. Some chapters are simply harder, and a lower rate there is a sign you were reading properly.
Can I compare readings from different books?
Not really. Page length, font size, diagrams and how densely the text is packed all change the number. Compare like with like: the same textbook across a week, or the same magazine across a month.
Does the timer keep running in a background tab?
The seconds tick while the page is active, and browsers are allowed to throttle background tabs. If you switch away for a long time, check the clock when you come back before trusting the rate.