

Zap Reader - Download to your brain as fast as you can handle - mildweed
http://zapreader.com/reader/

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tigerthink
The limiting reagent on my comprehension process is not the speed at which I
can shove words through my eyes.

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zasz
This was incredibly painful to use. It seems to display both short words like
"and" and "to" as long as it does longer words like "availability." I don't
need to dwell as long as I do on short words as I do on longer words, and I
expect most people would do the same thing. Also, the eye naturally likes to
move around and pass over certain phrases and pause at others (see
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_in_language_readin...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_in_language_reading)).
With this setup, you have to keep staring at the same spot. Interesting idea,
but doesn't seem all that useful, particularly if you can already read quite
quickly.

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radu_floricica
Link is down, but if it's what I think, it's not really that useful. I played
with something like that years ago, and more recently tried using it for
reading on my phone, and the limitations are:

1) Compared to classic reading, you can't stop or go back easily. For some
uses I suppose it's ok, but most times you want to pause during reading to
think a bit about what you just read, or simply rest for a coupe of seconds,
and this way you can't.

2) For mobile phones it's useful, but simply not as pleasant. I expected to
get a headache which didn't materialize, but still didn't enjoy it as much.

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jdunck
On #1, that's a simple interface problem. What if you could tap to pause,
swipe left to go back 5sec, swipe w/ 2 fingers to go back 15 seconds, &c?

I've used RSVP a fair bit. It's not for pleasure reading. It's for very
quickly deserializing info.

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jrockway
I don't read words all the same speed, but this application forces you to.
Very. Monotonous. I have a vague sense of uneasiness related to robots reading
me literature now...

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s3graham
Seems strange. I'm pretty sure I read clumps of words, not individual words
when I'm going quickly.

(also, disappointed in the title: where's my wetware interface already?)

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sdp
I gave it: <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6130/6130-8.txt>

And it gave me: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted
(tried to allocate 47 bytes) in
/var/www/vhosts/rickyspears.com/httpdocs/wwwzr/reader/index.php on line 68

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anigbrowl
I can handle 1000 wpm but it gets very lumpy for me - I get the sense of what
I'm reading OK but my brain is constantly going 'wait, what?' and I can't
really think about what I'm reading. Plus I hate it :-)

~600 wpm seems most comfortable. I wonder if it should (or already does)
slightly lengthen the time for longer words, as it does for words with a
period; other punctuation pauses would be good too. The period pause helps
comprehension a lot. It's really quite amazing that our brains can read that
fast.

It would be an interesting neurological comparison to know how this works for
a non-alphabetical language like Chinese, too.

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mildweed
Info on the science behind this speed reading technology:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Serial_Visual_Presentatio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Serial_Visual_Presentation)

~~~
tokenadult
<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

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jpd
What makes this better than the previously released www.spreeder.com?

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unalone
Seconding the Spreeder recommendation. Smoother and better-looking and it
looks like more customizable as well.

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diiq
The original RSVP, as I recall, had a car metaphor as the interface. An
analog, infinitely variable accelerator would, I think, make this much more
friendly --- in addition to the other remarks (combine short words, etc).

If it simultaneously scrolled through a gently greyed-out version of the text,
perhaps one could pause and review a more challenging excerpt before
continuing at the higher speed?

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blhack
A lot of you seem to not like this very much...

While certainly not very useful for things like technical manuals or
mathematics texts, for things like news articles, I love this.

The threshold at which I have to actually remind myself to pay attention is
about 450wpm...

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NEPatriot
I think this would be better if you could copy/paste txt into it. Most of the
time I only want certain portions of txt read. Def nice for stories/articles.

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mdoar
Ran out of space when I tried it with a Project Gutenberg text. Also, seemed
slower than advertised at the upper rates?

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AndrewWarner
I wish this was integrated into instapaper and the iPhone Kindle.

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GrandMasterBirt
regardless of the idea, its just like speed reading. You can get the
information into your brain quick enough but it takes time to process and
comprehend it. Speed reading denies you that processing capability so you
"read" but you don't understand.

