[ephemeral]

Get ready to blast through Anna Karenina in under six hours, said Angela Moscaritolo in PCMag.com. A new app called Spritz promises to help readers gradually increase their pace — up to 1,000 words per minute — by stripping out "the inconvenience of scrolling, swiping, squinting, and pinching to read on your devices."

Spritz (purportedly) works by flashing words one at a time on a user’s device, eliminating time-consuming eye movement and allowing "the brain to focus on each word, promoting faster reading and higher information retention."

Spritz has a preview on its website and will debut the mobile app on Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S5 smartphone and Gear 2 smart-watch. An iOS version is planned, too. The company says it will expand the number of supported languages beyond the current offering of English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Korean.

Learn more about Spritz here.
ephemeral

I'm actually interested on this, but I'm worried about headaches! It seems a cool exercise, but maybe a bit too exhausting.

I don't know. What about formatting? Do you loose the paragraph breaks, section divisions (extra line breaks) and other little formatting tweaks that help guide the reader through the flow of the story?

Just cramming one word after another down my throat does not seem like real reading to me.

[emmilina]

Spritz (purportedly) works by flashing words one at a time on a user’s device, eliminating time-consuming eye movement and allowing "the brain to focus on each word, promoting faster reading and higher information retention."

I'd like to see this in operation; curious as to whether it would make me dizzy!

[jaysee]

Looks really interesting.

Although I would imagine, in practice, it'll be much more of a tool to get folks' skim reading abilities up to a higher standard so that you can then read regular books at a faster pace. Notice how one letter is red so that instead of consciously reading the word you let your peripheral vision/brain do it for you. A famous example is this:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

More info here

Will keep an eye on this site for developments.



(Pun intended!)

[DubaiReader]

I think it looks useful for cram reading but I'm not sure I'd want to change my reading habits totally - but then I never thought I'd convert to e readers......