Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books

tommytman

I like how it pauses near where I would normally pause while reading. How did you choose the cadence?

kadhirvelm

Wow that was a fascinating experience - honestly the biggest revelation for me is how much I skim content without realizing it. Reading and remembering every single word, one at a time, and comprehending what was being said was more effort than I expected! I also took away how much I need the inter-word formatting to keep track of what's being said

hazn

i have tried variations of this many time, it personally doesn't work for me. the word flashes into my brain, and i can keep up with "reading" at high wpm's, but the whole sentence doesn't register. i am not seeing the forest because of all the trees.

Aaoo

I like it. Feels solid and cool. I read a lot of books with some images and graphs how they get processed?

carterEthan

Nice idea. I like the local-first approach. How are you handling large EPUB or PDF files? Have you noticed any performance issues with very large books?

dithernaut

Great idea, great execution! Took me a while, but I got used to controls. The only small annoyance i had was the “saved” notification popping up making me miss a few words. Would love a “zen” mode with no UI other than the text.

lagrange77

Cool idea! Maybe you could somehow integrate it with Calibre [0]. https://calibre-ebook.com/download

flowerbreeze

Very interesting, thank you for making it and releasing it for free! Do you get faster as you practice reading like that? I read ~50-60 pages per hour in English. That would be maybe 375-425 words per minute and also seems to be about the maximum I can more or less follow with ReadKinetic just trying the demo text. Although, I don't feel like I understand quite as well what I have just read and it felt a bit aggravating? Almost anxiety inducing for some reason. Maybe it's just because it is a new thing and I'm not used to it. Also, as others have mentioned, the controls took a bit of time to figure out.

ohaodha

I have a similar project for speed-reading in the terminal: https://github.com/0hAodha/ogma It works on plaintext, but you can define pre-processing hooks to convert, e.g., a PDF or webpage into readable content using the config file.

m3rone

This is a great experience. I wonder how an e-ink friendly version would look like. I don't think word by word would work but maybe sentence by sentence? but then would that break the effect? Either way, I'll definitely try with a book I've been procrastinating on reading ahahah.

wuschel

Very nice implemenation re usability. I have seen this before, somewhere, years ago - perhaps even on HN. Such a solution applies for text only instances. How would you solve it when graphs come into play? Display a graph next to it and pause the text?

jmiskovic

I like that there is a fallback to read the full text, but why are there two such app modes? I think if the main (non-popup) one should absorb the other's features like scrolling and bookmarks. For some texts the layout is also important to understand the context. Poems, structured text, paragraph breaks. If you read word by word and stumble into block of structured text, it's a lot of friction to figure out. I would love a background low fidelity representation of paragraphs, like the minimap in code editors, with the current word highlighted there. It could be passively monitored for places to switch mode to reading the full text, and to keep spatial orientation around character dialogs and such. It would have to not draw attention to itself though. The theme circle icons are not useful, they should preview text background and color. I see Dyslexic font is already built-in! Code is not available? It would be fun to hook this to browser extension to fast-read article in a ReadKinetic popup. I didn't mind the controls at all, they are obviously for touch and not mouse and it seems inspired by video player controls. This is a kind of app that you spend hours with, so better to have more features and options than to be beginner friendly. Very nice app, I like it so far.

miguelxt

There seems to be no way of changing the WPM setting after startup.

jodysalt

This is really cool! The scrubbing feature is neat. I wonder if you could create a browser plugin for this? It could either: - Replicate the entire app in a panel. - Integrate with the app - so it forwards the selected text/page for the app to process. Perhaps another idea would be to offer a widget people can embed on their site like a "Speed Read This Page" button. I really enjoyed playing with it. If you could somehow make it easier to integrate with different environments - it would be something I could see myself using regularly.

zeroday404

super brother

zeroday404

excelleny one

celltalk

Very cool! I like RSVP, I actually just implemented it in DuoBook as well. https://x.com/eonurkara/status/2079867443338449135?s=20

UnfinishedCompl

I don’t know man. Just because you bike it doesn’t mean you have to share it. Why is this top news. Look I vivbed the same thing 2 weeks ago. https://tachys-d23ab0.gitlab.io/

broken-kebab

What's the theory behind this idea? Why would I want to read it like this?

dombiscoff

Sounds like a pointless endeavour to me. This infinite efficiency quest for speed reading is chief pursued by those who don't read regularly, and so don't understand that ones comprehension comes from the pauses, the page turns, and the backtracks which make up reading traditionally. If one has no time to digest, are they truly reading a book or just an impromptu script?