While current Postal Address Readers have been adapted and fine tuned once and off-line in a central development lab, the concept of next generation readers presented here will contain a built-in learning capability, which can be referred to as continuous learning from letters. This will be performed on different levels of reading and comprehension, enabling the system to adapt itself to slow changes of mail mix and writing conventions.Preconditions of an adaptive reading system are discussed and an outline of such a system is given, which not only keeps track with the slow changes of input, but also optimizes itself to site specific conditions, thus guaranteeing an optimal solution at each site and at any time within life cycle. The system presented here is funded by BMBF (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) within the projects READ and ADAPTIVE READ.

Much existing knowledge about global consumption of peer-produced information goods is supported by data on Wikipedia page view counts and surveys. In 2017, the Wikimedia Foundation began measuring the time readers spend on a given page view (dwell time), enabling a more detailed understanding of such reading patterns. In this paper, we validate and model this new data source and, building on existing findings, use regression analysis to test hypotheses about how patterns in reading time vary between global contexts. Consistent with prior findings from self-report data, our complementary analysis of behavioral data provides evidence that Global South readers are more likely to use Wikipedia to gain in-depth understanding of a topic. We find that Global South readers spend more time per page view and that this difference is amplified on desktop devices, which are thought to be better suited for in-depth information seeking tasks.