Spreeder.com is a very cool tool for speed reading text online. In this
article I’ll be discussing all the neat little features that are in the
tool, that make it rock!

The basics
When you first start spreeder, you get a basic input screen for
text.
There’s no limit to the number of words you can paste in there. I
tried up to 100k words, and although the app slows down a little, it
works fine. You get the text in the box, either by copy-paste, or by
using the spreed! bookmarklet (which is even easier and eliminates the
copy-paste action).

The settings
In the righthand corner on the bottom, you can find the link to the
settings. The default is shown in the screenshot. The settings are:

• words per minute
  the effective speed with which spreeder will show you words
• chunk size (words)
  the number of words spreeder will show you at the same time
   
• window width (px)
  width in pixels
• window height (px)
  height in pixels
• font size
  again in pixels
• font / background color
  70 colors to choose from
• alignment
  center, justify, left   
   

The alignment option "justify" can give strange results in some cases as you can see in the screenshot.

The words per minute and chunk size settings are the most
interesting options, and the combination determines the "flash" time.
In the table you can find the flash time in seconds for different
speeds and chunk sizes. I suggest you keep inside the white area, the
orange areas are tricky as you’ll probably lose some effectivity, the
red area is very challenging and the chances of effective speed reading
are very slim.

Advanced settings
Quite hidden in the left bottom corner of the settings section, you can find the advanced settings. They are:

• 
  Speed variability
  This setting takes the length of words into account. Short sections get less time, long sections get some more time.
• Start new chunk at end of sentences and paragraphs.
  This setting ends chunks at periods. This gives a more logical chunk size, and helps comprehension.
• Slight pause at end of sentences and paragraphs.
  This setting adds a little pause here and there. The pauses are so small that you hardly notice them at all.
• Skip over "stopwords" which convey no additional meaning to the sentence (i.e. "the", "an", etc)
  This strips the text of words and reduces it to words with essential meaning. This obviously only works for english.

The speed variability is very useful and helps simulate a more natural
reading behavior. The other options can be used as you like them, they
are more of a personal preference.

Some hacks for the window size
You can play around with the window size to suit your needs. As you
increase the chunk size, you’ll want to adjust the size of the
window as well.

You can set the window like a single line with every
word next to each other, to resemble written text as you are used to
it. This is helpful in training for speed reading text outside of
spreeder as well. Use the following formulas for the settings:

• window width = monitor resolution - 300 pixels
• window height = font size * 2

You can also choose to have a single column with every word beneath
each other. This is a setting that gives a good view of all the words
in one glance for chunk sizes up to 6. Use the following settings:

• window width = 10
• window height = 300 (this will keep all controls "above the fold" for most resolutions)

My personal setup
At the moment I use 500 wpm @ chunk size 3 in a 700 x 40 window
with centered alignment and a 20 px font. I use both speed variability
and new chunks at new sentences. This is a comfortable speed for me,
and results in a good comprehension for me. The next step will be
moving to a bigger chunk size.

Summary
Spreeder.com is a very cool app that’s very useful for speed
reading text online. It can be setup to suit personal preferences and
is a great tool for getting your reading productivity up a notch. Speed
reading offline requires an additional set of skills to get through the
pages of a book, and still recognize all the words. They aren’t as
neatly isolated then as they are in spreeder. So while it can also be
used to train speed reading skills for offline reading, by design it’s
most suited as a productivity tool. And in that field it does a very
good job!

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