Reading App Lets You Blaze Through 1,000 Words-per-Minute

[Vivi22]

This looks pretty cool, although I'm wondering how much of a headache extended use will induce. I like reading before bed as a way to wind down at the end of the day, but I wonder if the fast pace will prevent that somehow. Still, something to keep an eye on.

I saw news of this app on another site a few days ago that had the above gif, as well as two slower ones before it so you could kind of try it out for yourself at varying speeds. Found that after a few minutes of adjustment to this new way of reading, I was actually able to just kind of relax and let it happen. In fact, I'd say it was easier to follow the more I relaxed.

That said, I do think this has it's place, and it may not be the unwind with a good book right before bed place.

 

[erbkaiser]

I wonder how much you'd miss by blinking. People (that are not the overly attached girlfriend) blink constantly, so I think you'd be missing a lot of words using this app. Would you even notice?

Try the chrome plugin... ~600 you do not notice the losses, but if something's "not right", you can press the left arrow to rewind the text a bit. Also, the space bar stops it.

Use the plugin on a book written in my native language. Was able to read at ~600 WPM and actually fully understand the text (which is >twice my normal speed). This is a truly outstanding idea here! I wish someone actually writes a proper tablet app for this. The chrome plugin doesn't work with tablets/phones and there seems to be some licensing BS going on... Thanks corporates...

I can see the use for it now, I've read a text I was meaning to anyway. At 500 WPM I was missing too many words so I brought it down to 300, works really well for that.
The only problem I have with it now is that I get a lasting after-image of the box on my retina when I stop reading... took a full minute before it went away.

Still an awesome app. I'm going to be trying it out a lot the weekend, I have books worth of texts I need to go through.

 

[Makabriel]

I'm seeing some flaws with the example shown above. Mostly that I keep missing small words that appear after big ones for some reason. I can never actually see the word between 'understand' and 'remember'. It is pretty easy to guess the word given the context, but it would still be nice to see it and not make my brain do more work filling in the gaps. Seems like something they should factor into the timings somehow.

Those aren't the flaws, that's how speed-readers read. The small words are fluff. Your mind has the ability to make the connections without them.

On the flipside, however, I prefer to read at a more casual pace. I don't need to read a novel in an hour. It's not fun. I'm fine with sitting back, relaxing on my porch and getting wrapped up in the story.

 

[Evil Smurf]

I normally read faster than most, I'm not really Interested.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

I can speed read already and while the embedded gif is slightly faster I occasionally miss concepts, themes and story-points when reading that fast.

 

[Vie]

Welp, I've always considered myself a moderately fast reader, but just managed to hit the 600wpm speed reasonably comfortably.

Though did get a weird phasing out effect on the corners of my vision.. ...then again normal reading with a book I get two separate images blurring over each other half the time and that slows me down so.. ...yeh, I think for me it actually worked.

The name needs to change though. Spritzing is some idiot with a spray bottle of water spritzing their hair to get it to hold in a silly style.

 

[The_Great_Galendo]

This doesn't impress me all that much, though I admit the proof-of-concept example works better than I expected. Still, I really can't imagine that this works all that well for textbooks, the one thing I really wish I could read faster (where, in my experience, you have to read a sentence/paragraph, then think about it a bit, then as often as not go back and read it again, then repeat as necessary).

I really don't want to be able to read novels faster. I read them naturally at about a paperback page a minute (maybe 300 wpm, I guess), and if anything I wish I could read them more slowly. It's hard enough to find good books as it is.

Also, unless Harry Potter books clock in at just over 60k words, you aren't reading one in "just over an hour" even at 1000 wpm. Even a short-to-medium length novel will usually clock in at maybe around 80k words, so it's more realistic to claim 2-3 hours even reading at speed.

 

[marioandsonic]

I already read pretty fast, so I'm fine with not using it.

To any student that has to do a book report, though? I'm sure for them, this is a godsend.

 

[M0rp43vs]

Wow lot's of fast readers here.
I don't see this being used for story books where the point is to take your time but it might be useful for technical texts or perhaps something that's required to be read in a short amount of time.
Now as to whether it'll work or not, I can see it varying from person to person.
Some can probably stay focused for a long time while others might drift off. Still, looks neat

 

[Dimitriov]

It's neat but I have to echo some of the above sentiments, namely that I can't imagine any actual use for it. It ruins reading for pleasure, and difficult things like textbooks require a lot more re-reading and stopping to absorb information anyway.

Seriously, this would allow you to quickly read gossip news I suppose, but little else.

 

[FPLOON]

So... It will make me read twice as fast than how I do now? Okay...

Too bad I would only want to do it to novels I've already read before... because doing something like this with a first-read novel doesn't sound that awesome in practice...

Dammit! Can you rewind back a couple hundred words? I think I found a typo [or was that just a name spelled weirdly] in the overall text!

 

[Undomesticated Equine]

It may have some uses like reading mail and news or things that do not require a lot of imagination or thinking about what are you reading, but reading a 1000 page novel in few hours, pointless you will get no experience. Imagine one of those wordy descriptions of some beautiful/scary place in a fantasy novel and imagine going through it in 3 seconds and then immediately moving on without a pause to think or imagine.

 

[Kaymish]

well i read primarily for pleasure or big legal contracts where taking your time and going back and seeing the whole lot in context is a must so this is going to be fairly useless to me unless i want to grab heaps and heaps of fluff information so i can lord how much i know over other people though i did not have much of an issue with the 500 WPM gif in the article
but yeah i read for fun so charging through a novel in an hour is going to bee too fast hell i burnt through a 18 book series too fast on my kindle as it is im stuck waiting for the next book to come out

 

[GabeZhul]

yes, for enjoying literature this app is crap.
but it helps you learn how to read faster.

the biggest problem with e readers is how they handle the movement and feel to navigate throught their product i.e a digitalized book.

and i am quite shocked they didnt improve it already.

with a book, turning the pages gives you a heptik feedback with the additional bonus that you have a clear break and re entry point into the text. the text ends and it continues on the next page. clean and simple.

with most e readers you scroll up and all the lines become fuzzy for a second, it suffers the same problems you have with reading longer texts on your pc.

this second already has the potential to disturb the reader so much that they tend to lose their orientation in the text. they have to invest more time to re orientate themselves by reading some lines again and determine if they already read it or not, if this was their break and re-entry point or not.
of course, this can become so tedious that people tend to lose interest in a text and never finish it.

experienced readers might highlight words with their mouse to orientate themselves better, but that is barely possible on e readers.

this is my theory why e readers "suck" in comparison with books. there are of course other points why they cant reach the quality of having a text in book form(smell, feeling of texture, feeling of ownership), but i think this is the biggest hinderance about e readers today.

All of these issues depend on the e-reader. In fact, I actually prefer reading e-books on my tablet's reader program especially since it doesn't scroll but have separate pages, no fuzzy fonts, etc.
Sure, having an actual physical book is still very nice, but e-books are much more convenient in many ways, so in the end it usually comes down to individual preference. I would say they are no way inferior to printed books, but each to their own, I suppose.

 

[viranimus]

I do find it quite compelling. My eyes hate traditional dark text white page and I am one of the few people who loathes paper books compared to digital format.

Over the years Ive been an early adopter to digital book storage for hand held devices and before that utilized audio books to keep up on reading. (Comes in especially handing working outdoors in the summer months)

I also discovered that my family has a tendency toward dyslexia and in fact I almost certainly had it myself but it had went undiagnosed and I somehow through a lot of initial struggles managed to teach my mind to compensate for it. (With as much as I both read AND write, It would be terrifying what my literary levels would be had I not had such a hindrance ) Knowing how I read, I do read rather slowly because my eyes do tend to jump and I end up having to "reset" and find where I was to start again. It somewhat seems as if this sort of utility could help quite a bit in contending with that for people. Just in the .gif example I was almost able to keep up. Longer words end up throwing me off at that speed which that does create a cascaded problem forcing one to rewind.

When I look at this, I am not even looking at it so much as to speed read, but more so to create greater ease in reading which this certainly would have the potential to do. I think I would need to drop it down a bit at least to begin training with it, because the 500 is "almost" comfortable.

The real problem I have with this, is from looking at the website this is something that is still in R&D-ish stages and is being built to become a large scale entity to be mass marketed and commercialized. Not a big fan of that, but thats not really my issue on that end. You can effectively at this point only try to sign up for SDKs for the purposes of licenining the tech for your own software or uses. It would have been nice had there been some manner of open example that people could have been directed to their site in order to do actual testing of it to see it in action with their own personal examples supplied. A web app one could at least copy & paste a segment to start would have been nice. It would have been great if a simple Android txt reader app were available.

However for what it is, and what we as consumers can use of it at this point, despite all the potential it represents, it seems a tad bit premature to be discussing it until the end user has some effective means to utilize it. Not just discussing something still relatively theoretical

 

[f1r2a3n4k5]

Color me skeptical.

It may work dandy for things like the example. We've seen, "Follow us on Twitter and Facebook and yada yada," so many times that picking up the word "follow" gets the point across.

However, a technical text? What about something like anatomy that requires constant thinking about visualization? In these cases, you actually need the slow reading time to comprehend the concept. It might be great for big, big picture or learning rote memorization, but absolutely abysmal for understanding. I'd be curious to see how they tested "comprehension."

On a more personal note, with reading for pleasure, the truly great authors are those that pick their words with such artistry that I have no desire to just "get the big picture." Sure, I can read all of Shakespeare's sonnets in a minute, but why would I want to?

 

[loa]

I doubt streaming an entire book like this would be enjoyable.

with most e readers you scroll up and all the lines become fuzzy for a second, it suffers the same problems you have with reading longer texts on your pc.

I don't know what kind of e-book readers you use but mine behaves just like a book, swipe right to left for the next page.
It technically can't even "scroll" due to the way the display works.

 

[sXeth]

The thing with speedreading at the upper ranges, is that if you were to go through Harry Potter, as the example given, you'd get that it was about Harry, Ron, and Hermione, who are wizards at Hogwarts, with a bully named Draco, who fight the dark lord. You probably wouldn't recall half the side characters, or any kind of visual description of anyone. Just the major important details.

 

[Niccolo]

I'd love this for textbook readings.

Otherwise? BAH. Half of the fun of reading is enjoying it at a nice pace.