Filed under: Text, Productivity, Web services, Freeware
Speed reading with Zap Reader and Spreeder
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.