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Double your reading speed in five days? So claim the people behind the QuickReader iPhone app
October 29, 2009 | 7:29 am
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By David Rothman
With all those zillions of public domain books out there—not to mention more recent e-books—what if you could double your reading speed in five days?
The QuickReader iPhone and Touch app, promoted in a just-issued news release, claims to be able to do that.
Is this the reading equivalent of, er, certain enlargers touted in spam-mails?
I’ll actually be open minded. I found that the interface is better than most e-readers’. And QuickReader comes with wonderful font possibilities, such as Georgia Bold (offering me the perceived text-background contrast that I enjoy).
The “how” issue: “You need to teach your eyes how to take in multiple words at once. As you do so, you will start seeing the trees for the forest by putting less weight on the component parts of a sentence and getting straight to its larger meaning.” A video is here.
QuickReader comes as QuickReader Lite (demo) or the regular version (special temporary price of $4.99). The $4.99 one at least includes public domain classics such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Pride and Prejudice.
Worth your time? I think so, although right now I won’t reach any conclusions about QuickReader’s efficacy or lack of it. Share your impressions! The App Store reviews are glowing, although I don’t know if they’re the real thing or plants.
Features (QuickReader’s wording):
- Read at a consistent WPM (Words Per Minute) speed
- Adjust your WPM incrementally
- Focus your attention on larger groups of words or lines
- Learn optimal eye tracking
- Measure your speed reading ability and improvement
- Practice anywhere, anytime and pick up where you left off
- Speed test
- Seven different guide styles
- Reading speeds from 100 to 2,000 WPM
- Fully adjustable guides, multi-word or multi-line
- Thousands of colors to choose from
- Multiple pre-packaged color schemes
- Options for font, size, and line spacing
- Adjust column width
- Portrait and landscape modes
- Go to last place on startup
- Rotation lock
Philosophical thought: Even if you can read certain books faster, do you want to? What about the sheer joy of simply lingering over the prose?
One thing I’m unclear about: Can I import my own documents into this app? If that feature doesn’t exist, it would be nice to add—complete with ePub, TXT and HTML capabilities. I can also envision other apps, such as Stanza, picking up some of QuickReader’s features.
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Comments:
From what I’ve seen, we’re not able to import our own documents into QuickReader. However, I don’t think that’s really the focus of QuickReader. It’s more for practice than constant use.
Do we want to read books faster? Sometimes… there are times when we just *need* to get through something as quick as possible. There are times when we just want to linger over the prose. It’s the difference between getting on the freeway to get to your destination in under 15 minutes and taking time to walk there. There’s a time for everything.
The philosphical thought thing – people who can read faster can take in the ‘joy of the prose’ just more quickly than you can.
@Blue – Isn’t that like saying fast food is more enjoyable than a slow cooked traditional sit down dinner?
I’d imagine that students would find the app really useful, but these days reading is one of the only activities that gives me the chance to slow down.
Thanks for posting about QuickReader. I’m the developer.
The app comes with 21 eBooks. In that way, it is similar to the Classics app in the iPhone eBook reader space, but with the added speed reading functions.
You can’t currently import your own content or other eBooks into the app, but that is the most popular feature request I’ve received and something I would like to implement.
Regarding the philosophical question… for me it comes down to a matter of choice. Sometimes I like to savor every word, other times I just want to absorb the material as quickly as possible.
And here I’ve spent years training myself to read more slowly.
Mark,
No, I am just saying that the ‘lingering’ by the slow who read one word at a time takes more time than those who read paragraphs at a time. That should be pretty obvious.