
Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly - iamelgringo
http://www.spreeder.com/index.php
======
remanc
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.

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

~~~
wozer
Thank you! That works much better.

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goodness
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
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.

~~~
Alex3917
"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.

~~~
soundsop
Is this the MindMap software you're referring to:
<http://www.conceptdraw.com/en/products/mindmap/main.php> ?

~~~
Alex3917
<http://freemind.sourceforge.net>

FreeMind is the best product out there because of its speed and its emphasis
on folding. The latter part might not make any sense until you play around
with it for a while and start making really big maps.

~~~
albertcardona
Folders in a file system, accessed from a terminal, do it for me. And
find/grep traverse them when I need to.

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orib
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...](http://abstractgeneratorfactory.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-java-isnt-
shit-part-2-conservatism.html)).

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
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...

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scott_s
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
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.

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hendler
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

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bootload
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.

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gojomo
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
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).

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npk
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.

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kqr2
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.

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jsmcgd
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.

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sant0sk1
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.

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

~~~
iamelgringo
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.

~~~
gry
There is one on the Plugins page.

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

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

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jgamman
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! ;-)

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LarryV
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...

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robinhoode
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.

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Andi
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 ...

~~~
s3graham
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
I think a scroll would be a lot more tiring, if your eyes have to track moving
information all the time.

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xccx
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

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louislouis
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.

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

