PhotoReading at 59% Off (Blog)

[Savage]

Use this thread to discuss the following entry from Steve Pavlina's blog:

PhotoReading at 59% Off

[TonyToneTone]

Steve,

Do you enjoy what you Photoread or is it strictly factual? Or do the facts pop up and then you enjoy what pops up?

I'm going to try one of their seminars out within the next year, thanks.

[cellardoor]

Has anyone tried photoreading with the new Kindle (2010 3rd generation model). And if so, is it still too slow?

[Snorkledorf]

The Kindle 3 is noticeably faster than the Kindle 2 but it still might be a bit sluggish for quickly flipping through pages the way you'd want to when Photoreading. Presumably by the time the K4 or K5 get here in a year or two they'll have improved the speed some more.

I just did a quick test on my K3 and it took 13 seconds to flip 10 pages at the smallest text size, and 9 seconds at the hugest size.

On my iPad the Kindle app, iBooks, and GoodReader (that I use for reading scanned PDFs, as 2-page spreads) each took about 5 seconds to flip 10 pages. Text size (on the former two) didn't seem to make a difference here.

My clumsy flipping through a paper book 10 times (to show ten 2-page spreads, or 20 pages) took about 8-9 seconds.

Text size is variable on ebook readers, so at a small text size you may be able to get a single "page" on the Kindle or iPad that shows the same amount of text as a 2-page spread in a paper book. So take that into account too.

I might start looking at the iPad for Photoreading now! I'd never really thought about it before.

[Savage]

Originally Posted by Snorkledorf

The Kindle 3 is noticeably faster than the Kindle 2 but it still might be a bit sluggish for quickly flipping through pages the way you'd want to when Photoreading. Presumably by the time the K4 or K5 get here in a year or two they'll have improved the speed some more.

I just did a quick test on my K3 and it took 13 seconds to flip 10 pages at the smallest text size, and 9 seconds at the hugest size.

On my iPad the Kindle app, iBooks, and GoodReader (that I use for reading scanned PDFs, as 2-page spreads) each took about 5 seconds to flip 10 pages. Text size (on the former two) didn't seem to make a difference here.

My clumsy flipping through a paper book 10 times (to show ten 2-page spreads, or 20 pages) took about 8-9 seconds.

Text size is variable on ebook readers, so at a small text size you may be able to get a single "page" on the Kindle or iPad that shows the same amount of text as a 2-page spread in a paper book. So take that into account too.

I might start looking at the iPad for Photoreading now! I'd never really thought about it before.

My 2 cents is that we want to be seeing around 0.5s/page (or 0.5s/screen) or faster to make PhotoReading practical and enjoyable. So the Kindle would need to more than double its speed again to make that work.

For me the fastest thing is to use my computer with a PDF. You can slide through the pages super fast that way, and you can see a lot of text per screen. But the iPad is a close second.

Even if it's practical for e-ink technology to reach that speed, which I have some doubts about, the iPad could probably increase its speed more easily. It may even be technically possible for iBooks to turn pages faster on the current generation of hardware and software, but I suspect the default page turning was configured more for beauty than speed. iBooks offers very minimal ability to adjust the settings at present. It would be nice to amp up the page turning speed if that's possible.

[Anne Dessens]

Can anyone tell me if Photoreading is better than speedreading? I took a class to speedread in college and learned how to zip through a page really quickly. Really good for zipping through newspaper articles.

But I didn't like the fact that I was missing some of the important stuff in the body of the texts when I applied this method to other types of reading.

I'm kind of a slow reader because I enjoy savoring the prose. Would Photoreading support this type of reading enjoyement?

[Elrond]

Cool stuff. I'm interested in the classic course. But I don't see any option for a pure internet transaction..? If I have to ship it over the Atlantic it's going to be over 50% more expensive.

[openeyes]

You CAN scroll and zoom with the 3rd gen kindle, at least within the browser. I`m typing this message on it via 3G.

I`ve yet to see what it can do with .pdf documents.