When I was assigned to read “Anna Karenina” during the summer before my senior year of high school, I had no idea how long it would take. Daunted by its length, and by the challenge of telling my Alexei Alexandroviches from my Alexei Kirilloviches, I put off reading it and put off reading it until, by the end of August—having only reached the beginning of Anna and Vronsky’s affair—I knew I wouldn’t be near finished by the time school started up again.
This “miscalculation” was mainly the result of procrastination, but also maybe the tiniest bit a problem of technology: back then, in the pre-digital age, physical books had a somewhat vague relationship to time. If you were a lazy teen-ager with an eight-hundred-and-fifty-page tome to get through, this nebulousness could work against you. It could also provide one of reading’s greatest pleasures: the feeling of getting so sucked into a fictional world that when you finally looked up from your book, dazed, you’d lost all sense of how much time had passed.
As we’ve transitioned from print to screens, we’ve started clocking how long reading takes: Kindles track the “time left” in the books we’re reading; Web sites like Longreads and Medium include similar estimates with their articles (total reading time for “Anna Karenina”: eighteen hours and twenty-two minutes); in June, Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit, published a book with a stamp on the cover advertising it as a “5 hour read.” These features all feel a bit dystopian, like things Gary Shteyngart might have invented for his futuristic äppärät devices in “Super Sad True Love Story”; if Jonathan Franzen’s next novel gets stamped with a “10 hour read” label, it will confirm all his worst suspicions about what’s wrong with the modern world. But the fact is that little of what we read on the Web today is formatted in discrete pages, so it seems logical that, as reading online continues to supplant reading in print, hours and minutes will become increasingly useful units for measuring our progress.
In addition to Kindle-style time tracking—or, perhaps, partially because of it—there’s been a recent proliferation of apps designed to help you read faster. Efforts to encourage quicker reading are at least a half century old: the educator Evelyn Wood commercialized speed-reading techniques in the late nineteen-fifties. J.F.K., an early proponent, was known to have read twelve hundred words per minute. But the methods for speed reading have transformed with digital technology. Whereas older techniques worked by teaching readers to modify their behavior—by, for example, using a finger or pen as a “tracker” to guide their eyes across the page, or eliminating “subvocalization,” the process of sounding out words as you read—the new apps keep time for readers by manipulating the presentation of text.
Apps like QuickReader, for example, use a highlighter mark that readers follow with their eyes as it moves from phrase to phrase at a designated speed. Apps like ReadQuick employ a technique called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (R.S.V.P.), displaying one or several words at a time in a fixed position at the center of the screen. Both of those apps allow you to control the speed, and to upload reading material from Web sites (mostly books for QuickReader, articles for ReadQuick), effectively transforming texts into adjustable word metronomes. At least one app, Acceleread, includes both the highlighter and R.S.V.P. techniques, and an interactive training course. At high speeds, both tools are mentally taxing, though R.S.V.P.—which allows readers to keep their eyes completely still, eliminating the time-consuming process of scanning them across the page and “fixating” on individual words—is also strangely passive; more than one person I’ve let sample ReadQuick has remarked that it feels a little like watching TV. (You can watch a demo of the app here.)
Making reading more like TV-watching is only one of the ways apps like ReadQuick feel a little troubling. Having your reading materials double as a stopwatch also feeds into the frenetic, distracted pace of online intellectual life, and the life-hacking, BuzzFeeding impulse to quantify and streamline everything. (BuzzFeed itself launched a books section of its Web site over the summer, following the success of a post entitled “65 Books You Need To Read In Your 20s,” and just hired its first books editor.) It also feels antithetical to some of reading’s best rewards: tuning out the pressures of the outside world, for example, or lingering on passages of special beauty or interest. Plus, if you’ve never used R.S.V.P., it probably sounds like a terribly jarring way to read; even Eric Mayville, a co-designer of ReadQuick, said, when I spoke with him by phone, that its flashing words are reminiscent of a strobe light.
But I have to admit that I find ReadQuick surprisingly appealing. It’s kind of thrilling, even a bit surreal, to keep your eyes fixed in one position while words file out of the screen and into your brain—not so much like watching TV as like listening with your eyes. Perhaps counterintuively, I feel less distracted when reading articles on ReadQuick than I often do when reading normally, likely because R.S.V.P. demands a higher baseline level of concentration. When using the app on the subway (and no doubt getting confused glances from my neighbors), I don’t look up at each stop, or switch back and forth between windows, and my mind doesn’t wander as it often does when I’m reading in public places. Also, if we want to crunch the numbers, ReadQuick does let me read faster: I can read longish articles—a profile of Hillary Clinton, or an interview with Antonin Scalia—at four hundred or four hundred and fifty words per minute, up from my regular rate of three hundred, which is right around average.
I would never want to read literary fiction, or poetry, or even most kinds of longform nonfiction with R.S.V.P. If I ever read “Anna Karenina” in full, it will not be the strobe-light edition. With the daily inundation of job-related reading material I always struggle to keep on top of, though, it’s kind of comforting to have a program that allows me to churn and burn. Part of being a happy reader, after all, is accepting that not all reading is for sheer pleasure, and then making time in your life for the kind that is.
Illustration by Maximilian Bode.
