tap to replay at this speed
one word at a time, at a pace you set
the mechanics
Reading a line is four or five separate stops, not a glide.
Each stop is a fixation, and the jump between them a saccade — during which you see nothing at all. At the end of every line comes the return sweep: a long move back and down to the start of the next one, and the one your eye is worst at. It undershoots often enough that you regularly land mid-line and correct without noticing. Most of reading is aiming.
what changes
So take the aiming away. Put every word in the same place, one after another, and the eye stops travelling — it simply waits. What is left is reading, at whatever pace you set.
That is RSVP, and it is the whole idea. Nothing here is a trick of comprehension: you read the same words in the same order. You just stop spending most of the time moving.
your words
Paste anything — an email, a chapter, a paper you have been avoiding.
Ebooks
Documents
Presentations
Markup and plain text
and their variants — 39 extensions in all · free · no account · nothing uploaded · works offline
your own library
Point it at a Calibre folder and it reads the catalogue in place — titles, authors, series, covers — shows you everything it found, and lets you choose. Where a book exists as both an EPUB and a PDF it takes the EPUB, because that reads far better. It tells you how much room the selection needs before it starts, and names anything it could not open rather than dropping it quietly.
No server, no account, no upload. The folder is read once, here, on your device.
what leaves this device
Not a promise — a number you can check. Open your browser's network panel and read a book; it stays at zero. Turn the wifi off and it still works, because there is nothing on the other end to talk to. That is also why there is no account: there is nowhere to have one.
the writing
Two dozen pieces on the mechanics, the evidence and the awkward parts — including where the research says speed reading does not work, which is not the usual thing for a speed reader to publish. Written because the honest version is more useful than the sales version.
How reading works
Does it work?
Your own books
There are also pages for the things people search by name: EPUB, PDF, textbooks and papers, Calibre libraries, reading across devices, reading privately, pacing that eases before a hard word and reading right to left. Everything shipped is in the changelog, bugs included.
the light you read in
Every one is a real reading environment rather than a palette: Paper and E-Ink for daylight, Candlelight and Sodium for the small hours, Darkroom's red safelight for when any white light is too much. The swatches below are the actual colours the reader uses, and pressing one holds this page in it.
Press one to hold the page in that light.