I played around with something like this a while ago (my files have 2004 timestamps, but those may have updated when I copied stuff to a new computer). I had a command-line based program that took text and displayed it a word at a time. If anyone would like to play around with it, here's my source.

Compile: c++ speedread.cpp

Usage: ./a.out [delay_in_ms] < text

Should work on Mac and Linux, and maybe Windows if you uncomment the first line. (Looks like a #include <stdlib.h> needs to be included to make it compile on Linux. Not sure what I don't need that on Mac).

It's kind of fun. I played around with showing words at a constant rate, and with throwing in an extra delay whenever there was punctuation. The version below does the latter. I had thought of this as a possibly good way for displaying text on the limited phones of the early 2000s. Also, I thought it might be an interesting way to display status information on many processes at once. A display line wide enough to display, say, 10 words could be used to display 10 status messages at once instead of one.

Oh...2 clause BSD license, if anyone cares.

    //#include <windows.h>
    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <iostream>
    #include <string>

    #include <unistd.h>
    #include <signal.h>
    #include <sys/time.h>

    typedef unsigned long DWORD;

    bool cont = true;

    void
    stop( int sig )
    {
        cont = false;
    }

    void
    Sleep( int msec )
    {
        usleep( msec * 1000 );
    }

    DWORD
    GetTickCount()
    {
        static unsigned long base = 0;
        struct timeval tv;
        gettimeofday( &tv, 0 );
        if ( base == 0 )
            base = tv.tv_sec;
        return (tv.tv_sec - base) * 1000 + tv.tv_usec / 1000;
    }

    int main( int argc, char *argv[] )
    {
        int delay = 250;
        std::string word;

        if ( argc == 2 )
            delay = atoi(argv[1]);

        signal( SIGINT, stop );

        std::cout << "\n\n\n";

        int words = 0;
        DWORD start = GetTickCount();
        std::string display_word = "";
        while ( std::cin >> word && cont )
        {
            Sleep(delay);
            ++words;
            if ( display_word.length() )
                display_word += ' ';
            display_word += word;
            //if ( display_word.length() < 5 )
                //continue;
            word = display_word;
            display_word = "";
            int punc = word.find(".");
            if ( punc == std::string::npos )
                punc = word.find(",");
            int pad = 15 - word.length()/2;
            for ( int i = 0; i < pad; ++i )
                std::cout << " ";
            std::cout << " " << word << "                                  \r";
            std::cout.flush();
            if ( punc != std::string::npos )
                Sleep(2*delay);
        }
        DWORD stop = GetTickCount();
        float seconds = (stop - start) / 1000.0;
        printf( "\n%d words in %f seconds\n", words, seconds );
        if ( seconds != 0 )
            printf( "%f words/second, %f words/minute\n", words/seconds,
                    (60*words)/seconds );
        return 0;
    }