My wife reads 10x faster than I do but completely eschews the kind of reading I like (viz, literature). But of course, now that, y'know, she has kids too, her overall reading speed is strangely reduced as well.
Anyway, at a first glance I found the line coloring helpful.
Very many concepts, words, metaphors, etc come from the King James translation.
Ignoring any religious stuff - it's a good read.
EDIT: corrected my st / king error!
A point of view on King Jame Bible: https://bible.org/article/why-i-do-not-think-king-james-bibl...
"It was my resolve to live watchfully, and never use my tongue amiss; still, while I was in the presence of sinners, I kept my mouth gagged, dumb and patient, impotent for good. But indignation came back, and my heart burned within me, the fire kindled by my thoughts, so that at last I kept silence no longer.
"Lord, warn me of my end, and how few my days are; teach me to know my own insufficiency. See how thou hast measured my years with a brief span, how my life is nothing in thy reckoning! Nay, what is any man living but a breath that passes? Truly man walks the world like a shadow; with what vain anxiety he hoards up riches, when he cannot tell who will have the counting of them! What hopes then is mine, Lord? In thee alone I trust. Clear me of that manifold guilt which makes me the laughing-stock of fools, tongue-tied and uncomplaining, because I know that my troubles come from thee; spare me this punishment; I faint under thy powerful hand. When thou dost chasten man to punish his sins, gone is all he loved, as if the moth had fretted it away; a breath that passes, and no more. Listen, Lord to my prayer, let my cry reach thy hearing, and my tears win answer. What am I in thy sight but a passer-by, a wanderer, as all my fathers were? Thy frown relax, give me some breath of comfort, before I go away and am known no more."
-Psalm 38 (39) from Knox's Translation of the Vulgate.
Knox's translation is lucid when compared with the "correct" and dead modern translations of the bible. Try it if King James does not speak to you.
But if you choose to read it as literature, I certainly won't stop you!
Besides we have MUCH better access to older sources now, and what do we find? Contradictions, contradictions everywhere.
Set the chunk size to three for best effect. Just gradually increase it each time, and also try using it occasionally with the speed far too fast. You'll get used to subvocalizing less, and reading multiple words at once.
Of course, for complex texts like the ones you read, it's natural to read much slower. I read 600 WPM for most internet articles, but I'm sure I wouldn't read plato that fast, nor as continuously.
That technique is called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Serial_Visual_Presentatio...
(The Wikipedia article should mention saccades (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade) but strangely it doesn't.)
I wrote an RSVP reader in the mid-to-late 90s in QuickBasic. I'll have to see if I can dig up that code. :)
I am still annoyed that things like the Kindle don't have that mode.
Has anyone made a syllabic RSVP reader before? Might be interesting to see how much more natural it would be (my hunch is "a lot").
In terms of increasing reading speed, you may want to try the utility "dictator" for those texts which are electronic. For physical books I would run a finger under text to maintain momentum as Adler suggested in "How To Read a Book". Make notes in the text, being sure to use a custom set of symbols to speed notation. Write concise thoughts in the margin, don't go overboard.
Good luck.
For a hacker, it is normal to not subvocalize.
I think it is also one of the reasons that we hate meetings so much. An email can be written at about 40 wpm, and read much, much, much faster. So past 2 or 3 people, the dominant strategy should be text, unless sidechannel meaning is needed (where emotions are involved or whatever).
That's been debunked a while ago. There's no such thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization
What it doesn't help with is transposing from adjacent lines when reading the middle of a column, which happens to me all the time. The middle of the column is always black, so there's not much of a cue to keep you on the same line.
In making my workaround to get a similar effect in calibre, I made a variation I much prefer which cycles red->green->blue, so that column centers are always easy to separate.
You can change the font size and line height by a little bit without needing to adjust anything (since the color gradient is continuous vertically, it is a bit tolerand), but if you make a dramatic change, you'll need to adjust the background height from 72px to the height of three text lines.
Would love to see it confirmed or falsified.
(As a note, I am probably under this hypothetical threshold; I'm not a slow reader, but I find that efforts to speed up my reading speed generally push it down instead.)
Anyway, my experience from this is that it was much easier to differentiate, parse, and scan with the ugly colours (43% faster apparently). However, my natural slowness in reading is in both understanding and committing to memory. I get the feeling that this did not help much with regard to this..
For me, I found the changing color to be too distracting. My eye was constantly being drawn away from the text I was reading to another color on a line below or above.
It may be worth noting that I only have one eye, and it's not a very good one - 20/100 visual acuity with about a 15deg. visual field.
If you don't mind me postulating, I wonder whether this difference is something intrinsic to the focussing effect of binocular vision, or if your field of view has maybe trained your brain to be more urgently perceptive to peripheral vision?
then again, maybe its just colour perception.. or different strokes (and thanks, I just learnt about binocular summation.. fascinating)
Either way, quick experiment shows it to be horrid for me.
Here's what I mean: http://www.stationerytrade.com/upfile/images/big/20122221112...
What about using eye tracking? A device could just detect you're at the end of a line, and put a small marker at the start of the next line.
But I agree that it sucks for quick scans - the different colors just add another layer of complexity for our brain to process...
I felt (without experimenting in a measurable way) that particularly the blue-red transitions _really_ slowed down my "normal" reading…
edit: although in this case, they have a patent pending and apps in development, and are offering licensing agreements.
Regarding your scanning approach. An idea I've had is to format each word based on how common it is.
Still, I think it is a cool idea and will give the bookmarklet a try for a while.
It's a clever idea, but anecdotally, from my experience, I'm finding it slows down my reading -- I'm having a hard time processing the blurbs because I don't read "linearly" -- I scan content to find the relevant parts, and the color changes are making it difficult to scan (because my eye can no longer use color to determine what is scannable and what isn't), and multiple columns is actually making it even more difficult (it looks like the blue in column 1 leads into the blue in column 2, instead of the blue at the next line of column 1). By trying to force me to read line-by-line, instead of scanning efficiently, it's making me read slower.
But that's just for short-form stuff. It could turn out to be faster for some layouts, and slower for others. But honestly, I've never felt I had difficulty locating the start of the next line... is this a problem that needs solving? But nevertheless, it's certainly a good example of clever out-of-the-box thinking.