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Kindle on Android: learning your reading speed… and how to turn it off

[I added an update at the end of this post so you can read the solution – kudos to Karl Buehrens !]

I just had a Kindle software update on my Samsung Galaxy Note II Android 4.2 device that has a added a new feature : “reading speed”.

Now whenever I’m reading there is this grey text that is appearing on the bottom of my screen and it is annoying me with it’s info and constantly changing text. And there is currently no way to turn it off.

Learning reading speed” … “8 minutes left till end of Chapter”… 36% read.

WTF ? Who thought that this would be informative and useful to show this all the time ?

Why would I want to know how many minutes I still have to read to the end of the chapter ? Am I doing forced reading ? No. I read for my enjoyment, and it bugs me a lot to see that grey text. It detracts from the story that I’m reading and delivers nothing extra.

It’s almost feels like I should take my stopwatch out and see if I can read it faster and beat my reading speed.

Amazon, please add a disable function to the settings so that people like me who just want to read their story won’t get so annoyed with this grey line of text. Your app was fine as it was.
Update: a commenter on this post found the solution : you need to click on the message, and after several clicks, it will turn off and disappear !!! Non-intuitive, I kept searching in the settings menu.

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9 replies on “Kindle on Android: learning your reading speed… and how to turn it off”

It also needs options to put the margins right out to all edges of the screen. On android 4.x it should also be able to completely remove the home and other buttons from the screen.

Another thing it needs is a version without PDF support to de-bloat it. By making it so big, amazon has cut a good size chunk off their market – anyone with a phone that has a small amount of memory and no card slot. The version prior to adding PDF could run on many more phones.

Adding pdf to the kindle app was pointless since most android phones come with a pdf app that cannot be removed without rooting the phone.

On Kindle Fire, you can turn it off. Simply tap directly on the area where the “Minutes until Chapter End” is and it eventually gets disabled.

It’s an annoying feature. It was on the downloaded Sample stuff, so it makes you wonder if the purchased stuff is suddenly going to time out.

Just called their Mayday support. They said to click on the time amount message. It is supposed to pop up a setting, but it doesn’t. If you just keep clicking, it will change or turn off completely. Set it once, it works then for all books.

Just touch the message showing your reading speed. It’ll cycle between some other information, and then will disappear entirely. To get it back, just touch the same area again.

I had the opposite problem. I like having the reading time and it disappeared on me. There was no viable solution found in the Amazon forums so I googled it and came across this article. Touching the screen where the time had been caused the time to reappear. Thanks for the help.

Ha! It shows that there are different tastes to account for. They really should add a small help/tips to their app though.

I’m glad you were helped as well !

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