Spritz
This might be the most exciting thing I've seen on the Internet in five years: Spritz reading. By breaking down reading materials into one word at a time, the software allows you to read 500+ words a minute with virtually no practice or training. I tried their sample and it seems to work.
Unfortunately, it looks like they're far from having any books online that you can Spritz. When they do, I have a few long-winded authors to Spritz through.
I've never been a big fan of speed reading, though. Part of my dislike might stem from my natural reading speed. Although I often get bogged down in a text (thinking about the substance or wondering why a certain stylistic usage is correct), fast reading is apparently one of my gifts. I didn't realize it until college, when friends studying around me would notice how many pages I had read in, say, the last 45 minutes and commented on it. So in that regard, speed reading probably never appealed to me because I never felt like I needed it.
But most of my dislike stems from the parenthetical above: you ought to stop to think about the substance of what you're reading (and maybe even the prose itself). You ought not speed-read a literary artist like Dostoyevsky. You can't speed-read poetry. It's malpractice for a lawyer to speed-read a contract. At some level, it's probably sinful to speed-read the Gospels.
Reading isn't supposed to be a chore. It's an inter-active art.
That being said, speed-reading definitely has its place. If they start to put newspapers into a Spritz format, you can count on me subscribing.
Heck, Spritz might be the thing that saves newsprint. By putting their publications into Spritz format, the big boys--New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, etc.--could attract new subscribers. I know I'd be far more inclined to subscribe to a publication that allows me to Spritz it . . . since I rarely find popular prose worth pondering.
