Speed reading with Zap Reader and Spreeder

Filed under: Text, Productivity, Web services, Freeware

Speed reading with Zap Reader and Spreeder

by Ian Smith Jan 30th 2007

I've been an on again off again speed reader for some time. Every couple of years I find myself in the book store going through the discount bin and finding, buying, and reading yet another speed reading book. I'm addicted to the idea of speed reading, even if the art itself somewhat escapes me.

Spreeder and Zap Reader are two tools designed to help you improve your speed reading ability on the web. The basic idea behind each tool is that you copy content from the web (an article from the New York Times, for example) into the tool on the website. Then you click the play button and "read" the article one word at a time. Controls let you adjust the speed at which each word is shown to you so that you can read faster or slower.

Both of these tools work well for speed readers because they let you work through an article more quickly by resting your eyes at the same place on the screen as the application churns through the content for you. And, since speed reading is really the art of recognizing words and phrases instead of just letters, the focus on a single word acts as a kind of flash card system to help you memorize both small and large words quickly.

Zap Reader offers a number of plugins and addons so you can use it with everything from your favorite blog software to Yahoo! Mail and Wikipedia. The Reader itself also makes it easy to navigate what your reading by jumping to the next or previous sentence and you can control the display speed by clicking the up or down arrows.

Spreeder's player lets you customize the background color, foreground color, and speed of display. You can also easily navigate your document by dragging the status bar to your desired location. The interface itself is slicker and easier on the eyes.

If there is any issue with both Spreeder and Zap Reader it is that they, for obvious reasons, strip out all the formating and context from the text you are reading. This is only a problem because web documents are often heavily formated with sub-headers and bullet points to to allow easier reading to begin with. Without these features you are looking at pure text and you may find some types of documents (blog posts, for example) easier and quicker to scan on your own.

Since both tools are more or less doing the same thing it is really a matter of personal preference as to which you should use. I prefer Zap Reader because it displays the word count and lets you increase or decrease the speed with one click. That said, I could easily live with Spreeder as well.

Tags: speed reading, SpeedReading, text reader, TextReader

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Mark Kawakami said 6:09PM on 1-30-2007

Sadly, speed reading is mostly a sham. Despite what people trying to sell speed reading materials claim, pretty much every rigourous study indicates that after an initial minor gain in reading pace and comprehension, any further increase comes at steeper and steeper costs to reading comprehension.

Trust me, buddy, I've been there too. I've got like five books that make me feel like a failure for not being able to triple, quadruple, cube, whatever my reading speed. But the sad truth is you read at the speed you read.

Barry said 11:00AM on 1-31-2007

A double entry??? You guys wrote about Spreeder in August...

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2006/08/29/spreeder-another-online-speed-reading-application/

Do your homework

Ian Smith said 11:57AM on 1-31-2007

Oops, I did do a search but wasn’t able to find anything. Looks like both Zap Reader and Spreeder were covered. Good eye!

Cruds said 11:54PM on 1-31-2007

We always read words instead of letters. That's why ALL CAPS words are harder to read, its harder to trace the contour of the words because the height is the same for all letters.

jong sung kim said 10:04AM on 2-28-2007

This tool is very usuful to read to news
좋아요

Phil v. Sassen said 1:46PM on 4-01-2007

Is there a tool that can be downloaded and used on a local computer?

Dave Coleman said 6:09PM on 10-15-2008

A smarter tool than both of the above is Spreed:News. RSVP technology is old and can cause serious eye strain. Spreed is a research company focused on an area of cognitive psychology called Eye Science. They have an algorithm that breaks full text content into small chunks that are flashed in the same manner, but are intelligently grouped to reduce strain and increase comprehensin. They have a proof of concept up at spreednews.com, but just release a newsletter saying they are also providing a document uploading tool in the next couple of weeks. If guys want some fresh material to cover ... you should check them out!

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