The PhotoReading book is included with the self-study course along with a couple other books. IMO it would be really hard to learn PhotoReading from just the book. It contains much of the info from the self-study course, but there's something about going through the process with the audio CDs I found much more helpful. I think the reason is that PhotoReading is an applied skill, not merely an idea you need to absorb.
The book gets mixed reviews on Amazon, and I think that's with good reason. Probably the best analogy I can offer is that learning PhotoReading from the book would be like trying to learn martial arts from a book. You will gain some understanding of the skill, but it's unlikely you'll pick up the skill itself. It's not quite as extreme as with the physical skills of martial arts, but it's close.
I've never been to one of the live PhotoReading seminars, but I imagine that's probably the best way to learn it. The DVDs have recordings of the live seminars, and they contain lots of additional tips beyond the book.
Personally I'm not a big fan of the way Learning Strategies chooses to market the PhotoReading system. I think the way they promote the benefits is too new agey and over the top. That type of marketing is common with personal development products though, so I'm used to looking past it.
The basic PhotoReading process involves a series of passes where you aim to get the material into your subconscious mind and then consciously activate the material. Perhaps the most important thing I learned is that it's critical to have a clear purpose for everything you read. When you read without purpose, your subconscious mind has no clear guidance on what material to assimilate and make available consciously vs. what to disregard. But when you read with a clear purpose, your subconscious will act like a homing system, processing the material below the level of conscious awareness and bringing to your attention the exact material you need to be aware of consciously.
Initially this feels like a freakishly strange way to read. It takes a while to get comfortable with the idea that your goal is to extract information that satisfies your purpose, not to read every word. As I mentioned previously, I wouldn't use PhotoReading if my goal was to enjoy a fiction book. But it's a great tool for extracting non-fiction information. The real heart of the system is conditioning your subconscious mind to make you consciously aware of the information and ideas that satisfy your purpose.
In a way PhotoReading fits nicely with the whole intention-manifestation model. You're basically saying to the universe, here are my questions, and if the answers are to be found in this book, bring them into my conscious awareness.
Without a clear purpose for reading, PhotoReading is unlikely to work well.
Think of PhotoReading like a search engine. If you type in nothing, you get no results. But if you're clear about what you want, the search results appear. If you're fuzzy about what you want, you get fuzzy results. So the more you know why you want to read a book, the better PhotoReading works.
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