October 23, 2013updated 24 Oct 2013 5:30pm

Times readers spend 30 minutes with the tablet versus five on the website

Readers accessing newspapers on tablets spend longer reading than with any other digital format a recent media conference heard.

Tom Whitwell, head of digital at the Times and the Sunday Times, said: “The iPad app is not a facsimilie of the paper edition. We launched it as a bundle and on average people spend 30 minutes reading it a day.”

Whitwell told the Digital Editors Network meeting at News UK's Wapping HQ that studies have shown that people read the tablet editions completely differently to the website version of the paper.

“People stay five minutes on the website if you are lucky and they go from a story straight back to the homepage. On the iPad they can spend 10 to 20 minutes on a particular page or a section.

“As journalists we know how to tell stories. But as editors we have to be able to turn those stories into bundles. We can see from the iPad edition that people spend longer on the app version than the site.”