I can only speed read for a couple hours at best, as staring so close at something and carefully moving my eyes so quickly is extremely exhausting. I can read at slow speeds for a lot longer, but I am pretty sure it is still horrible for my eyes :(. Either way, it is mentally taxing, as I have to convince my brain to not start talking to itself and begin ignoring the visual input.
In contrast, I can spend an entire day listening to people; and, while I am listening, I can be looking into the distance, the way human eyes are supposed to mostly be used. I can walk around, cook and eat food, or even shower, all while listening to people talk. I would argue listening to other people is a much more "human" activity than staring at symbols (despite how much I do this for my passion: software development).
I also have no clue where you got those numbers from: the iPad software I have finally found to read PDFs to me has me configure it in words per minute, and I find it reasonable to understand 400 words per minute for long stretches. I bet I could go faster (this software supports 500), but it would likely be mentally taxing.
To put in context how preposterous 150 words per minute is, the average person supposedly speaks at 100-130 words per minute according to some random source I just found (which feels right as I took years of linguistics and was going to guess 110-120), and we know people routinely listen to videos at 2x (and so are hitting 200-260).
(I think it is also worth noting that actual speed reading is a skill most people do not have. I actually think it quite likely that your average person can read only as fast as they can speak, as I bet that people who are not really really good at reading are subvocalizing. I feel like a lot of people don't consider this when saying everyone should read all the time.)
What is the name of the ipad reading software you use? I tried using the basic text to speech but can’t figure out how to tell it how to start reading at a point and keep going. Being able to tap to rewind 10 seconds would also be useful
Voice Dream Reader. Given the issues you cite this will be perfect. I really appreciated that it models your progress through the document as "time" as it knows how long it would take to read the whole thing. The only thing I am disliking is that the act of highlight text for something like bookmarking is extremely slow and fidgety (it has word issue like trying to highlight the last character on a line is extremely difficult as the hit test only verifies you are on the right edge of a character, but if you go past the character there is no hit box so it doesn't recognize anything, causing you to have to wiggle your finger on the last character trying to intersect that narrow hit box; it mostly seems to rely on you touching through the character after the character you want to highlight, but there isn't one at the end of a line... they need to like, scan left and see if there is a character to the left of your finger to make this easier).
In contrast, I can spend an entire day listening to people; and, while I am listening, I can be looking into the distance, the way human eyes are supposed to mostly be used. I can walk around, cook and eat food, or even shower, all while listening to people talk. I would argue listening to other people is a much more "human" activity than staring at symbols (despite how much I do this for my passion: software development).
I also have no clue where you got those numbers from: the iPad software I have finally found to read PDFs to me has me configure it in words per minute, and I find it reasonable to understand 400 words per minute for long stretches. I bet I could go faster (this software supports 500), but it would likely be mentally taxing.
To put in context how preposterous 150 words per minute is, the average person supposedly speaks at 100-130 words per minute according to some random source I just found (which feels right as I took years of linguistics and was going to guess 110-120), and we know people routinely listen to videos at 2x (and so are hitting 200-260).
(I think it is also worth noting that actual speed reading is a skill most people do not have. I actually think it quite likely that your average person can read only as fast as they can speak, as I bet that people who are not really really good at reading are subvocalizing. I feel like a lot of people don't consider this when saying everyone should read all the time.)