I already found a similar/older question, but can we somehow influence the Reading Time calculation that Scrivener shows?
And If not, can we make that a feature request?
Background: I just bought Scrivener to write an audiobook, and naturally, the reading time is a crucial value and it’s less about the average (book) reader, but about the actual reading time for the final audiobook. I did some testing and found that a scene shown with 5 minutes reading time in Scrivener will end up being more like 9 minutes when read aloud as audiobook.
It would be fantastic to be able to do a global adjustment in the software instead having to calculate the difference every time I check the estimates for scenes, chapters and the entire book.
When I was doing a lot of editing and recording of English soundtracks for videos where I had to match my timing to the Chinese source, I worked out that using Times New Roman 12pt on A4 pages with 1” (2.54cm) margins, worked out at 6 secs/line.
So if you work out how many lines you have per page, that will give you a rough timing per page; it’ll be a slight overestimate because of part lines at the ends of paragraphs, but if there are any long numbers written in digits like date, they will take longer than words (121 is only 3 glyphs but five syllables when read).
But it’ll probably be close enough per page, and if you write in page mode, it’s easy enough to keep track of how many pages.
why not add a custom metadata field and calculate the reading time for your audiobook per 500 words and then you can do a rough math calculation. So if 500 words takes 2 minutes to read but 4 minutes in your Audio book. 750 words would be 6 minutes of audio, 1000 8 minutes, etc. Rough count to give ballpark and true calculation for book total and act totals. and if have audio book length, can back calculate what your word total should be to achieve this and know how many words to aim for.
You could in a backdoor way. Let Scrivener read a long text document and time with your phone. When finished you can calculate how many words read per minute. So if it is150 per minute for example change paperback page count from 350 to 150 and number of pages becomes reading time with pages being minutes to listen to your audio book.
