An interesting tweet popped up in my feed earlier this morning:

429 words per minute (wpm) is not extremely fast for someone who’s been practicing speed reading for a while, but the tweet as a whole caught my eye. “Spritz” has been getting a lot of press recently for its mobile app that will let you speed read by focusing your eye on one point of the screen, but it hasn’t existed for web browsers. Now it does.

What is Squirt?

Squirt is a very simple Javascript bookmarklet that you can run on (almost) any page. It will pull out the main body text (or the text you highlight) and read it to you word by word at any speed from 250 wpm up to 950.

The overlay letting you choose a speed

What you see as you’re reading. Beautifully minimalist.

For online reading this is an amazing product. After a bit of warming up I’m comfortable in the 750-850 range, and I’m sure with a bit more practice I’d be fine at 950. At that speed I get through most articles in less than two minutes, and can do my morning news catch-up in a fraction of the normal time.

But There’s a Problem

Here’s the one downside to both Squirt and Spritz. I don’t do my heavy reading online. The times I need speed reading most are when I’m going through non-fiction business/psychology ebooks and PDFs, and neither of these exist as articles I can use Squirt on.

The value of speed reading is lost on 1,000 word articles since you would have probably skimmed it anyway. When you can get into a speed reading flow and finish most NYT Best Sellers in less than an hour… now we’re talking.

The Solution

After a couple of minutes digging around online it seemed like a lot of people were leaving GitHub comments asking for a solution to this. I looked through the Squirt repository and based on how it’s written, any body text on a page can be pulled out speed read.

The solution then was simple: create a plain HTML page with the Squirt link embedded in it, and copy my own text into the file to speed read it in my browser.

Here’s how it works:

Go to this GitHub repo and copy the HTML file into a folder on your computer: https://github.com/Nateliason/squirt-html-base Open the HTML file (Notepad is fine, no need to get fancy) and paste in the text you want to speed read where it says “YOUR TEXT HERE” Save the file Open up PowerShell, Terminal, doesn’t matter, and navigate to the folder you have the HTML file in Run “python -m SimpleHTTPServer” (I’m assuming you have Python installed. If you don’t, do that first.) Go to your browser and type in “127:0:0:1:8000" in the URL field, and you’ll see your text file! Click “Start Speed Reading” and you’ll be good to go

I assume someone (maybe me) will make a static site where you can paste in text you want to speed read with Squirt. This is a temporary fix until then.

Wait a Second…

That doesn’t completely solve the problem, does it? Amazon has DRM on its kindle eBooks (as do most eBook publishers) and you can’t just copy/paste out of a PDF since it’s technically a picture of a document.

Luckily these problems have already been solved for us. A simple Google search will find a whole host of websites that can convert your PDFs to Word files for free (and they actually do a very good job). Likewise, you’ll find a couple sites/programs that can turn your Kindle ebooks into word files.

But please: do not steal ebooks. Don’t pirate text versions of them. Buy them, download them, and then convert them. Anything else is unfair to the authors

Now all you need to do is copy that text into your HTML file, and you’re good to go.

Happy reading!