ReadKinetic shows one word at a time in a single fixed
position, so your eyes stop moving across the page. The
technique is called RSVP — Rapid Serial
Visual Presentation — and it removes the mechanical costs of
reading: the jumps between words, the long sweep back to the
start of each line, and the reflex to drift backwards over
something you already understood.
Everything happens on this device. Your file is opened,
parsed and stored in your own browser and is never uploaded
anywhere, which is also why the app keeps working with no
internet connection once it has loaded.
What you can open
EPUB — chapters, cover, title and
author read from the book itself, opened at chapter one.
More on EPUB.
PDF — running headers, footers and page
numbers stripped out before they reach you.
More on PDF.
Kindle books — MOBI, AZW3 and PRC, when
they are DRM-free. A DRM'd file is encrypted and no
browser can read it; ReadKinetic says so rather than
importing an empty book.
FictionBook (FB2), with its chapters and
author metadata intact.
Word, OpenDocument and PowerPoint —
DOCX, DOC, DOTX, ODT, ODP, PPTX, ABW and RTF.
LaTeX, reStructuredText, Org-mode, Markdown,
HTML and plain text, or text pasted straight
from your clipboard.
How it is driven
Hold anywhere on the reading surface to
read; let go to stop.
Let go, and the book is there — the
whole page, at the sentence you reached, with its
headings, figures and tables where they belong. Nothing
opens and nothing closes; stopping is the page.
Tap any word on it to read on from
there, or drag the page to read ahead with your own eyes
without moving your place.
Your speed is the number at the top:
drag it, roll a wheel over it, or use the two ends. It
works while nothing is moving, so you never lose the
words you spent choosing a pace.
Space, arrow keys and a full keyboard
map do the same on a desktop.
Your place, your speed and your typeface are remembered
per book, on this device, with no sign-in.
It reads English, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Khmer, Lao and
Burmese — the unspaced scripts get real word segmentation
rather than a whole paragraph flashed at once.
If this text is still here after a few seconds, JavaScript
has not finished loading. The reader needs it, because there
is no server doing the work.