Ask HN: How does Medium calculate how long it will take to read a post?
Medium and many other sites have a calculation for how long it might take you to read that particular post. How is that calculated and is there a library to add that to any site?
I'd assume that they're taking a word count and then using a predefined number of words per minute to figure out approximately how long the article will take to read.
For example, https://medium.com/fragmented-musings/295cc75cd1fd has approximately 600 words and has an approximate reading time of 3 minutes. From this we can deduce that they're assuming that around 200 words can be read in a minute. By diving 600 by 200, we arrive at 3.
Get your articles total word count, and divide by the average word read per minute.
Here's a WP plugin that does this: http://codecanyon.net/item/minutes-to-read/full_screen_previ...
I'm guessing simply dividing word count by average words per minute[1]
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Reading_and_co...