Hate reading slowly? Spritz aims to allow people to read 1,000 words per minute

ronjor · Feb 27, 2014

By Williams Pelegrin

If you ever wanted to read “A Game of Thrones,” odds are you were put off by the sheer number of pages each book in the series contains. For example, it is 819 pages worth of reading. Especially if you’re a slow reader, that doesn’t sound like a very fun number of pages. What if I told you that you could read the massive book in less than five hours? Spritz allows you to do just that.
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http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile...aims-allow-people-read-1000-words-per-minute/

Minimalist · Feb 28, 2014

Wow, that looks great. Thank you for sharing, ronjor.

hqsec

noone_particular · Feb 28, 2014

That reminds me of the high school speed reading class I took. It used the same idea with a projector.

beethoven · Feb 28, 2014

Very interesting but how about you actually like to read and get engrossed in a different world? You are not just reading word after word, you also want to let your mind roam and picture what the writer is describing, bring it to life.

The program seems great to me if I wanted to rush through something but I don't think I would find it enjoyable.

stapp · Feb 28, 2014

beethoven said:

Very interesting but how about you actually like to read and get engrossed in a different world? You are not just reading word after word, you also want to let your mind roam and picture what the writer is describing, bring it to life.
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You obviously read in the same way I do. For me the mark of a good book is where I can see the surroundings and people in my minds eye that the author is writing about. I can do that at speed but there are times when you have to slow down or re-read a phrase for comprehension ot just 'cause it's so good

I'm a very quick reader anyway due to a requirement of a job I had.

SweX · Feb 28, 2014

Interesting, i'm sure it will be useful for some people.

mattdocs12345 · Feb 28, 2014

Why would you need to be able to read 1000 words per minute?

ams963 · Feb 28, 2014

@beethoven and @stapp
Couldn't agree more. I consider myself a moderately quick reader.

MrBrian · Mar 10, 2014

Is Speed Reading Possible?

Techwiz · Mar 11, 2014

People want immediate satisfaction. This doesn't surprise me. Would be nice for the long boring reads, but I agree with others that this would kill the enjoyment of reading for fun. I made it through whole series (eragon, harry potter, lord of the rings, etc.), older literature from authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs, James Blumgarten, Upton Sinclair, etc. To be fair, audio books have become a new obsession for me recently. I listen to disks while driving and when ever I get stuck waiting on someone or something else. It's pleasurable, but I still prefer finding a comfortable place to sit down and read. Also, I'd like to see car freshers with an old book scent.

Hungry Man · Mar 11, 2014

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/...soon_read_an_entire_harry_potter_book/cfr6abm

This sounds too good to be true. That's because it is. RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation --- the technology being showcased here) doesn't work.
This technique was a massive field of research in military neuroscience in the 1970s, and scientists have tested reading speed and comprehension using RSVP [1]. I'm just going to summarize their findings here:
(a) RSVP feels as though it works because we can see all of the words. At no point do we feel we are missing anything. But this doesn't mean that we actually can process the words.
(b) RSVP doesn't increase rate of comprehension of the materials involved. The primary limitation on reading speed is not the rate at which we read words, but the rate at which we process the information. When you read faster, you don't remember as much of what you read.
(c) Reading with RSVP can cause problems parsing sentences. In normal reading, our eyes scan around the page, looking back and forth across the sentences. This is not possible with RSVP, and the lack of ability to do that limits the rate of comprehension. Furthermore, RSVP suffers from attentional blink problems more then normal reading, which is the inability to process words or ideas that are repeated within ~100ms of the first instance.
(d) The net result is that reading with RSVP is no better than skimming the material using normally presented text. In fact, they perform almost exactly as well.
With that said, there are a few things you should know with regard to this RSVP app or RSVP in general.
First, the examples they present are misleading. They provide us with very short sentences and the reason that we can process them is because the sentences are so short. We can keep them in memory and then finish parsing what they said after the animation finishes. If the RSVP stream continues, like in a novel, we wouldn't have that time.
Second, RSVP does have some valuable uses, just not for reading quickly. RSVP can be very useful for people with peripheral vision or peripheral memory issues where having the words presented in the same space compensates for these limitations. RSVP can be useful with small display devices, where very few words can be shown on screen at the same time.
[tl;dr: App developer rediscovers fundamentally flawed 1970s technology.]
[1] Many, but see, for example, Just et al., "Paradigms and Processes in Reading Comprehension."
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ams963 · Mar 12, 2014

@Hungry Man
Useful article. Good read. Thanks.

coffeetime · Mar 12, 2014

Reminds me Chinese lessons I started taking. Chinese is easier. You can communicate twice or three times as fast in Chinese than in any other language, and obviously with the benefit of being the most spoken language in the world.

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