I don’t know how many people remember, but some years ago this craze of rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) was everywhere, with Spritz being sort of the first big app that demonstrated it. It was the idea of an app presenting you text one word at a time, in a fixed location so your eyes didn’t have to move, and you could adjust the rate that the words appeared, with the claim that you could read much faster this way than the standard way of reading. There were articles, videos, and discussions everywhere about it, with people arguing on both sides about it being terrible or amazing. But just as quickly as it appeared, it seemed like it dropped off. Now if you search for any of these things I’ve listed in the title, most of the results that come up are from that time period about 7 years ago. Even looking up kindle word runner links to essentially a blank amazon page (can anyone that uses the kindle app verify that it even still has this feature?). It does seem that there’s still a few apps that have been recently updated in the google play store that advertise the ability to do this type of reading, though, but none seem very popular (or at least, they don’t seem popular specifically for this feature).
As someone who never actually tried this style of reading for anything more than an article, but was curious, what happened? Did this type of reading turn out to be a gimmick once people tried it for longer works? Just too much eye-strain? Too little material absorption? Or does it still have its die-hard followers? Does anyone here use apps like this to read and can comment?
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