Improving Speed Reading Sites

I just posted a message to Spreeder, my favorite speed reading site, with a few recommendations. Here they are for those who might be interested:

1) It would be great, if over the course of reading an article, Spreeder automatically increased its display rate by 5% from the start to the finish. That way, a reader (a spreeder?) would always be pushed to improve his/her reading speed.

2) It would also be great if there was a link or icon a person could put on their blog postings – like the ones you see for Digg or Del.icio.us, etc. – so a person’s blog entry could automatically be sent to Spreeder for reading. If I make a long blog posting, other people will be encouraged to use Spreeder to read it (or at least it will be more convenient for them).

3) I’d like to see an option to hide everything on the screen – or at least in the browser window – and only display the text (word, chunk, etc.) I’m trying to speed read.

4) An option for black text on white, or white text on black (or green, or yellow, etc.) would also be nice.

If Spreeder doesn’t take advantage of these ideas, maybe another speed reading site will.

Perhaps, these features are already available, with Spreeder or another speed reading site, and I just am not aware of them?

Related: Overclock Your Reading Speed (Zen Habits)

Comments

  1. scottr says:

    Hi, I have been working on a speed reading tool I thought you might like to try out. Rather than just flashing the words up individually it uses more traditional speed reading techniques in dynamically displaying the text. It allows you to vary the speed as you go using the mouse-wheel. It is an browser application so there is nothing to install other than a bookmarklet.

    The site is http://zestytext.com.

    Cheers,
    Scott R.