I’ve nattered on about this in a previous post, but it’s percolated back up into the forebrain and I thought best to get it down.
Reading, specifically how fast I (or anyone) can read.
Listened to The Dragon Page Cover-to-Cover on the iPhone this morning, specifically episode #332A. One of the hosts expressed how surprised he was to discover that not only were books less intimidating on his Palm Pilot because there was no relative size between a big fat fantasy and a slender cozy mystery, but that he could read them faster than he could a traditional book.
Which makes sense. Not that I’ve taken to reading on my iPhone yet. I’ve experimented with a few apps like Stanza and even Shakespeare, but I still have too many physical books that are in the to-read shelf to get invested in yet more fiction. But the faster reading that the e-book offers fits in nicely into my personal observations that given an old paperback published 20 years ago or more and a modern paperback (or worse, trade paperback) printed in the last ten years of similar word count and I will finish the first before the latter given the same amount of time to read.
I wondered why that is. I guessed it had something to do with the amount of eye movement, how much work I had to do to scan the information. The older books are thin, but dense, with tiny letters that should send my eyes screaming into a blindfold. But they don’t. I read more material, more quickly, when it is in a smaller font. It seemed counter-intuitive, though. Isn’t is supposed to be easier to read if the font is large?
Then I discovered iReadFast. The a-ha moment. This neat little program allows you to cut and past wordage into its black screen and then you set the rate of speed that it flashes each word at you. It’s a steady stream of word after word, and your eyes don’t move at all. Boom. It’s like a download for your brain. You can scale it up to 950 words a minute, can even tailer the settings for longer words verses shorter words. It allows you take in huge amounts of information very, very quickly.
But. (There are buts.) There is no looking up, no forgiveness for distractions. You’d have to have a trigger finger ready on the mouse button if you wanted to savour something, or go back to double check it. The words themselves exist not in a document per say, but along a sliding bar, so it is not easy to go backwards precisely. But otherwise, absolutely yes. The only limitations, beyond the need for focus, come from the documents themselves. If you were to cut & paste in from an e-book, for example, the header information and page numbers routinely break the text flow.
Now, would I read fiction that way? No. Non-fiction, yes. But not a story. For the same reason, I don’t listen to audio books. I’m a podcast addict, but I listen only to informational podcasts. I cannot listen to fiction and go about doing other things like walking to work or cooking or driving or what-have-you. Fiction taps into some other part of my brain that shuts off motor skills. I enjoyed the hell out of Scott Sigler’s Earthcore when I listened to it last summer but I had a hard time following it while I worked. I had to go back up the audio and start again, not because of unreadability (unlistenability?) but because of work-related distractions that pulled me out of the narrative. Same was true for Mur Lafferty’s Heaven series (which made me cry). Love ‘em, but the audio book format is not for me.
In this day and age, you’d think people would want to see books with few pages and smaller type. Makes sense economically, environmentally, and eyebally. Of course, if the Kindle would just make its way to Canada, or better yet, across the globe, the whole thing would be wonderfully, delightfully, moot.
