Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly

http://www.spreeder.com/index.php

by iamelgringo • 18 years ago

64 45 18 years ago

spreeder.com

eisokant• 18 years ago

A bit skeptical at first - this tool is pretty handy when you have to speed read through articles.

iamelgringo• 18 years ago

They could really use a bookmarklet to auto load the article to be read.

But, after a little bit of tweaking, I was able to get my speed up to 500 wpm without too much trouble.

jonknee• 18 years ago

http://www.spreeder.com/plugins.php

gry• 18 years ago

There is one on the Plugins page.

http://www.spreeder.com/plugins.php

orib• 18 years ago

I found myself reading faster without this. It doesn't account for variations in how quickly I can recognize a word, or whether I had to think about what was just said. It just blats out the words in a monotone emphasis, demands complete attention (someone calls your name, and you turn around? gotta start over, or at least spend plenty of time seeking) and fails with images.

I just tested my reading with both this and the original text of an article (for those curious, it was some random chunk of text that was posted here: http://abstractgeneratorfactory.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-jav...).

When reading the article over (2nd time, avoiding pauses to think) I managed to get the 2072 words read in about 2:20 (so, between 850 to 900 words/min).

When reading with spreeder, I couldn't keep track past 600 words/min.

This was done a couple of times with consistent results (so it wasn't just me remembering what I'd read beforehand)

swombat• 18 years ago

One important problem with spreeder is that when you read normally, your eye jumps much in the same way as it does when using spreeder, but it captures 2-3 words at a time, not 1 word at a time.

So with spreeder, your speed is actually divided by 2-3, you lose the context, the ability to pause and think, the images, the ability to skim, etc...

goodness• 18 years ago

Check out the Wikipedia article on speed reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading

Even if rapid serial visual presentation improves reading speed (which is dubious), it has enough negative aspects to counteract any benefits. For example, going back or doing any controlled skimming is difficult. You also lose all the contextual and landmark cues of page layout.

nickb• 18 years ago

I took a speed reading course long time ago and even though they had some interesting points about how to read, it was mostly filled with complete bullshit.

Comprehension always trumps speed. I'm always surprised by people who say "I've read that book in an hour" or something like that. When I read, I get hundreds of ideas and have hundreds of questions in my head and I usually either write them down or look up the references on the web. That takes time.

I read a lot and the only piece of advice that has worked is: stay focused and concentrate on what you're reading. Don't have an email client open, don't have a dozen tabs open... just eliminate all of the distractions and concentrate on what you're reading.

mtrimpe• 18 years ago

You should try PhotoReading ... the basic principle is that you 'scan' the pages once and then skim through the book in your mind, at your leisure, focusing on comprehension of the text.

Not that I ever learnt how to do this though, not even after I put a full 15 minutes of effort into it.

Concerning this kind of spead-reading; in my experience it's great for alpha-subjects (is that English? It means non-scientific in Dutch). I used to be able to read 400 page books at 40 (or 60, or 80, probably 80 because my memory is always exaggerated) seconds per page and still get enough out of it to pass the tests.

Alex39172• 18 years ago

"When I read, I get hundreds of ideas and have hundreds of questions in my head and I usually either write them down or look up the references on the web. That takes time."

I have a pretty good method down now that might work for others. Whenever I'm reading a (non-fiction) book I put a dash in the margin next to any important point. I usually have two or three marks per page. Then after I'm done reading I go back and retype the sentences I marked into a MindMap. That way I can read the book at a reasonable speed since I'm not making marginalia, and after I'm done with the book it takes maybe three or four hours to transcribe into the MindMap.

Typing out the full text of the interesting parts of the books is relatively fast since I am a fast typist, only slightly longer than condensing it down into quick notes.

The MindMap itself has a few advantages. First, the hierarchical nature of the software provides built in context and allows me to mentally switch gears between the different layers of the argument very fast. Because of this I often am able to create new ideas that I wouldn't have been able to have otherwise. It also makes it very easy for me to incorporate the important parts of the book into other projects later. If someone says something that reminds me of a book on news.yc, I can find the relevant quote and have it cut-and-pasted into the comment field in less than a minute.

Also, because I organize all my startup ideas and other projects in MindMaps, I can easily drag and drop an entire book directly into that project if it is relevant. Then if I'm talking to someone about the project and they ask me a question, I can look up the answer almost instantly if I don't already know it offhand.

aasarava• 18 years ago

Indeed, page architecture is very important in helping readers parse and comprehend the information on a page -- especially on the Web.

As Jakob Neilsen's eye tracking studies have shown, most people don't read the text on a Web page linearly, they scan it in an F pattern (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html). Good info architects design pages to convey the most important information in these spaces and put supplementary information below and to the right in case the user needs more info. Likewise, they use hierarchical headings to show relationship between information, and bullets and ordered lists to show groups of information.

With spreeder, the benefit of all this architecture is gone. You may be able to read the words faster, but do you actually comprehend the concepts and do you have good recall later? I'm skeptical.

Now, if a future version of spreeder could parse a page and somehow show these hierarchies and groupings in a simplified way (isntead of just showing one sequential word at a time), that might be interesting.

ars• 18 years ago

Ask and you shall receive:

http://liveink.com/demo_samples.php

And the slashdot about it: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/11/148220

xlnt• 18 years ago

If it has certain merits, and certain demerits, then as long as you carefully select which things to read normally, and which to read with it, it will help you.

If you want to skim or go back, don't use it. But there are sometimes things you read where you don't need that.

breck• 18 years ago

I recommend How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. Everyone laughs when I recommend a book about how to read a book, but it definitely helped me a lot.

sant0sk1• 18 years ago

It seems to pause every once in awhile. I enjoy the slight break in action but if it were a little smarter it would pause at the end of a thought or sentence.

kqr2• 18 years ago

There's another website which pretty much does the same thing:

http://zapreader.com/

I wish my kindle would support this, however, its e-ink display is too slow.

axod• 18 years ago

Terrible terrible idea. I can't see this working for many people at all.

gojomo• 18 years ago

In the late 90s, there was a company called 'Cornix' pushing this technique.

More recently, a research project called 'BuddyBuzz' out of Stanford was pushing it for reading on cellphones.

radu_floricica• 18 years ago

Reading for cellphones would _really_ be something.

Also, it might be better in cases where you want to be sure you read the whole text, rather then skimming, maybe learning? (obviously not always).

Andi• 18 years ago

This is crap.

You read a TEXT. A text is not just an array of words but an array of words linked to each other in context. So you don't get information out of your text very well if you see one word after each other. It's useful to go back and re-think what you have read sometimes. The other drawback is that information is unequally distributed in the text and some parts can be read in a quicker way than others. Text is never linear for a human being.

So let's drop this application. You better read 1 text and get the whole context than read 3 texts in the same time without giving your brain what it wants ...

s3graham2• 18 years ago

Perhaps a really fast scroll would make more sense, so you could see a few words to the left and right for context.

alex_c• 18 years ago

I think a scroll would be a lot more tiring, if your eyes have to track moving information all the time.

bootload2• 18 years ago

"... You read a TEXT. A text is not just an array of words but an array of words linked to each other in context. So you don't get information out of your text very well if you see one word after each other. ..."

That was my first reaction as well. The difference is I tried a quick experiment to see if what I thought was what was actually happening. While individual words read out do appear chunked maybe gains in reading can be made by pre-parsing the text. I noticed it was much like reading a piece of text out aloud and the only stumbling blocks long words.

xccx• 18 years ago

this needs an easy way to speed up and slow down, like a hovering (no click) control on part of page.. or maybe control speed from the keyboard: right forward left backward up faster down slower arrows.. said control can slow text to stop, then speeds backwards.. bidirectional speed control on the fly is what this needs

scott_s• 18 years ago

This reads in my head the same way it would sound if I pasted the text into a text-to-speech tool. That is, robotic, stilted, and lacking context.

When the rate at which you ingest words is fixed, it doesn't allow you to actually process them. What's important is concepts expressed and learned in a given amount of time, not the words scanned.

chandler• 18 years ago

Personally, it seems that increasing the number of displayed words allows me to process the text much faster. For instance, I can comfortably read and (mostly) comprehend at ~400 wpm when 30 words are displayed on screen at a time, while with only 1 word-per-frame I'm struggling to read and have zero comprehension.

Comprehension-wise, at the 30 wpf setting, the trouble seems to be when the app splits at sentence boundaries.

It's very interesting that this simple tool gives me personal insight into how I visually process texts.

s3graham2• 18 years ago

I thought so to at first. If you put it at something more like normal reading speed (600 maybe?) it flows a bit better. I'm not quite sure what it's supposedly improving though.

hendler• 18 years ago

Regardless of merit, I like that it is javascript, free, and a focused demo. The idea that there are other ways to read a page is captivating. Losing page context happens with audio books as well.

Suggested Improvements: * A hotspot animation of the body of text instead of a status bar * could work well in low page real estate - a ticker-reader. * clickable, or used to navigate search results

jsmcgd• 18 years ago

I like it. There seems to be a lot of negativity here but I think it could have a lot of value, especially if you needed to wade through large volumes of text.

LarryV• 18 years ago

I think this might be a useful application for mobile devices. Maybe a sort of newsreader that would pre-load the day's headlines and let you read them this way on the subway...

remanc• 18 years ago

Just thought I'd weigh in since I'm the author of the app. I was pleasantly surprised to see my little pet project from a couple years ago make it onto hacker news, since this is the first site I go to to read my daily news.

Anyway, the intended purpose for spreeder is not to supplement your reading (I personally don't use it for that purpose), but rather as a training tool. The one (and probably only) thing I got out of any speed reading training course was that there's a lot of redundancy when reading texts.

People "read" text in their head (subvocalize), which slows down reading (vs just seeing + understanding it). Also, most people tend to reread a lot as well since they're not focusing.

Spreeder is meant to be a trainer of sorts. When words are flashing at a high speed in front of you, you're forced to focus more on what's going on, and you don't get a chance to reread things you missed. So you're naturally inclined to pay more attention. When I want to train, I read at a speed where I can barely keep up - it helps eliminate me naturally trying to subvocalize the words in my mind.

In the end state, I've found it's helped me in my normal reading. I don't actually use spreeder to read my daily dose of internet stuff, but I spend less time in the unfocused state so I get more out of it.

Just my two cents.

wozer2• 18 years ago

If you feel like improving it:

I have trouble reading long words with spreeder (for example when reading German texts). Maybe you could make the tool pause a bit longer for words above a certain threshold.

spydez• 18 years ago

That's already an option. Look for "speed variability" in the advanced settings.

Baltropreneur• 18 years ago

Awesome all around! Congrats!

npk• 18 years ago

Very interesting. I'm not sure if speedreader improves my reading speed, but I noticed something when applying it to my thesis. It's much harder to speedread poorly written text! So, on a handful of paragraphs, I've concluded that speedreader is a great "debugging" tool.

robinhoode• 18 years ago

I just tried it out and I love this thing already! Although this might be because I have a fetish for hypnosis-inducing flashing images :) Would love to see a Firefox plugin.

bprater• 18 years ago

Most people read in phrases, not in words. I would think 300wpm would be baseline for most folks.

bootload2• 18 years ago

A couple of things I noticed:

- No check on JS being blocked. Trivial but the site just gives a blank stare.

- When loading the first time the RH Google adverts advertise competitors before your app.

- Why are you flashing 1 word at a time?

The first 2 are trivial, the third I'm not so sure about. In any speed reading that I've read about or tried the emphasis is on being able to increase the chunk of text the eye/brain can input and comprehend at once. When I added some text to read I (surprisingly) could comprehend the text at default speed. The speed however was not fast enough. And I got the distinct impression the reading flow was broken up by word instead of sentence. So I then tried a quick experiment using the tool to read the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading entry.

Surprisingly it worked pretty well. I got through the article pretty well. I even read on the pro's and con's of "centre-based" text vs whole word chunking and agree this one works well after you get used to it. One thing I did notice was large words can be missed if shown infrequently. I also tried to move the text to left justification. It did not seem to solve this. It would be interesting if you had some training tests to calibrate your speed and check your comprehension. Read a 1800 word essay, answer some questions to see if you are reading at your optimum.

All in all, the app works for me.

jgamman• 18 years ago

i've always thought this would be useful for reading books using an iPod nano screen or cellphone etc. i'm sure that if your commute was long enough, you'd find a pleasant rather than arduous speed for reading after a couple hours practice. The earliest reference i can think of for this idea was a Heinlein novel where he basically described web/hypertext (not sure where he picked it up, he was pretty upfront about only needing to be 6 months ahead of the pack to appear to be a predictive genius! ;-)

louislouis• 18 years ago

wow what an awesome app. I love it! I'm a slow reader cos I subvocalize and re-read words all the time. So many times I've stumbled on an interesting article but gave up reading cos it took too long. Now I can just blast it into this app and get it done.

Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly

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