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bluefoxicy writes
"Speed reading has matured into technological solutions. Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, or RSVP, provides faster reading than the manual finger-following method, with retention on par with standard reading at 250 words per minute. Research shows most people can start at 400WPM, and reach 800WPM in an hour; and further advancements used in products such as Spritz and Sprint Reader claim 1000-1800 words per minute when practiced by offsetting and context pausing.
Thus far I have not found any software to read ebooks with these methods. Are there any open source applications, Nook or Kindle Fire applications, or otherwise to read ePub or Mobi or Kindle books via RSVP?"
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The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that
will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful.
-- Mark Twain
(Score: 4, Interesting) by FrogBlast on Tuesday March 11 2014, @01:16AM
Back in the stone ages, before iPhones, I ran an RSVP speed reading app on a feature phone with a 128x96 (or similar) screen, because I desperately wanted to read The Assassin's Apprentice without having adding to my packload. It was J2ME, obviously, and books had to be pre-converted to the format it wanted. The major downside is that when you do miss something, scrubbing back and actually finding the right spot is incredibly difficult. Whether it was the technique, or just the novelty, I think it actually helped me focus, though. I still try it sometimes for breezy fiction, but not for anything I need to study carefully.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday March 11 2014, @12:09PM
"breezy fiction"
How does that work emotionally?
For example, consider the first lord of the rings book. Slow psychological burn, becomes a scary creepy thriller as they're pursued, and that's part of the charm of the book. I took about a week to read it. Now if I could speed read, and down that book in an hour, it would change the aspects of the book that are a dramatic thriller into something more like a surprise party. I would imagine romance novels turn into one-night-stand novels if you speed read them in 45 minutes.
This also fits the aspects of the weird. Some of the classics I read for my education (Herodotus, Xenophon, Plutarch, the usual ...) are familiar enough yet weird enough to be incredibly appealing, and I think you miss the educational aspects of thinking about life since they were written, if you race thru as fast as possible. Is the Anabasis supposed to be a slow psychological thriller or a two hour action flick? I think the former, but...
Another problem, "the old man and the sea". Or perhaps some Joyce, how about "Ulysses". The whole point is to slowly savor the deliciousness, the savory (unsavory?) flavors of the work. The glow of the descriptiveness. If I could make the old man and the sea take ten times as long, while still remaining a good book, I'd do it in an instant. Its like going to a museum or art gallery or zoo with little children, where their goal seems to be to glance at everything for as little time as possible, whereas I could stand at each exhibit for five minutes, maybe an hour for the cool exhibits. Another analogy is food. Ground up snouts and entrails and rotten potatoes boiled in rancid old oil and a gulp of corn syrup, like fast food, I totally agree, get that over with ASAP. But a decent steak dinner with all the trimmings, I'd like that to take a nice leisurely hour from stuffed mushroom appetizer, past the fresh ceasar salad to the steak fries and a nice filet mignon and ending with the small glass of sweet cherry wine at the end. Yeah gulp down that BSE burger but savor every bite of something good.
Finally given something really complicated, I'm thinking of my old diffeqs textbook, or Strang's linear algebra textbook, I can read the words a heck of a lot faster than I can internalize the knowledge. Sure I can read the word "eigenvalue" really fast but that doesn't matter if my cognition is the limiting reagent. You could say that I've spent most of my life fooling around with Maxwell's equations, fundamentally anyway, and reading them really quickly isn't much help.
So... whats the point of speed reading?
(Score: 1) by TK on Tuesday March 11 2014, @07:06PM
Speed reading is about crossing "to read" books off your checklist.
When you read The Brothers Karamazov in an hour it's about a drunken idolator who gets murdered by his son. But the story wasn't the point of the novel, the characters are.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 1) by FrogBlast on Wednesday March 12 2014, @04:12AM
To be honest, speed wasn't the goal for me. The goal was to read the book from my phone, and as you can imagine, 128x96 doesn't create information-dense pages. So, rather than tap the right-arrow tens of thousands of times to flip through miniscule pages of hard-to-read text, I thought I'd let the phone do the flipping, and make the words relatively large and legible. I was glad to see there was an existing program to do it for me, but I suppose I didn't really use it as intended.