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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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Are you ever going to do the dishes? Or will you change your major to biology?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11 2014, @05:51PM
It does take practice. Back in the 90's I used a program to do this with giant text on the PC. IIRC I was up to 1200 WPM before the next jump became too much for me to adapt to (given a 60Hz monitor your WPM options are limited to 3600/integer, so the speed increases *very* quickly at the high end: 900 -> 1200 -> 1800 -> 3600). Modern software often is a bit more adaptive, flashing short words more quickly than long words for example, but still run into the same basic problem - there's no way to display a word for a fraction of a frame.
At any rate I reached the point where I would read a word, integrate it into the sentence, and reflect on it a bit while tediously waiting for the next word to appear. The combination of tedium from the inability to bump the speed up further without jumping to ludicrous speed, along with the inability to vary pacing or easily flick back to re-read a phrase/sentence that didn't parse right eventually caused me to give it up, but it was fun for a while. I could whiz through a novel or technical document in a fraction of the normal time, but the experience was considerably less satisfying. Also, I hadn't yet discovered Project Gutenberg (in fact I'm not sure it even existed at the time)
(Score: 2) by wjwlsn on Tuesday March 11 2014, @07:40PM
I think I need to adjust the Sprint Reader options considerably. It is adaptive, as you mentioned, so shorter words are flashed faster than longer words, but I find the amount of variation to be distracting. It does seem to be fairly configurable though, so I might be able to tweak that specific issue.
I got up to about 900 WPM pretty easily, but I think I may have scaled up the speed too soon. At 300 WPM, it seems like the delay between new words is interminably slow, yet comprehension is easier. When you get to a level at which words flash by at a pace that seems reasonable, however, comprehension seems to suffer. I will probably go back to 600 WPM for a while and see if that improves things.
I am a traveler of both time and space. Duh.