Terrible terrible idea. I can't see this working for many people at all.
Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly
11–20 of 47 posts
Re: Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly
#12Check 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.
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.
Re: Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly
#13In 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.
Re: Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly
#14[deleted]
Re: Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly
#15This 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 ...
Re: Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly
#16Check 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.
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.
Re: Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly
#17this 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
Re: Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly
#18This 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.
Re: Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly
#19Regardless 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
Re: Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly
#20Check 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.
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 r…
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.