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Comment by johnwatson11218 | Hacker News Reader

I have used the zapreader.com website to read longer articles before and found that I can understand everything when I keep it to about 500 wpm. Recently I started downloading the audible.com audio books for novels that I have laying around. Then I listen to the book at 2X while reading the paperback. This really does seem like a large improvement. When I listen to just the audio book my mind tends to wander as I'm usually doing other things. Reading and hearing reinforce each other.

I would be interested to try something like the spritz method with audio that stayed synchronized.

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I like spray-mode in emacs. Not so much for reading faster, but I scan articles really fast, and sometimes after scanning a bit I decide I want to read and entire long (usually non-fiction) article. For me it's actually easier, and less tiring for a long article to use spray-mode. Since I usually use w3m or eww for reading web pages in emacs, it's really easy to do.

Kindle supports this for many titles. If you have both the book and the audiobook you can read and listen and the app will highlight the words and automatically progress the book.

You used to have to pay full price for both which made it too expensive for me but they seem to have started offering cheaper upgrades recently.

There's some research that shows learning is improved when the information is presented in multimedia form.

> they seem to have started offering cheaper upgrades recently.

So much cheaper, in fact, that the ebook+audio bundle often costs less than their monthly Audible subscription which lets you buy one audiobook per month for $15.

About a year ago I started watching youtube videos at 1.25-1.5x. Now I wish Netflix and Hulu had similar options.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

You're welcome :)

Hah! Got anything for the XBox One? :P

That's an interesting idea. Do you find it works equally well with non-fiction and fiction?

So far I have only tried fiction. I have Bose headphones so I can pause the audio with a button on the headphones which is nice when I need to stop and go back over a paragraph. If I were reading non-fiction and there were charts or diagrams I imagine I would use that feature a lot.

It seems like when I was younger it was easier for me to get completely immersed in a book to the point where I wasn't really seeing the individual words anymore. I would enter a flow state where I would just see the contents of the book unfolding in my mind's eye. Listening to the audio while I read puts me back into that state very quickly and keeps me focused. I have only been doing this for a couple of weeks so it is still early days. It seems like I keep more of it in my mind and notice larger patterns and themes that unfold over many pages.

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