NOTE: If you are a speed reading workshop graduate, read this using your new techniques! Either use the cursor as a pacer or if on your laptop, just lean over with your pen. Remember to always start with the Overview, always work toward just "seeing and knowing" the word. Go for it!
There has been considerable talk lately about the future of reading. Google's recent announcement that it is contributing to the digitization of libraries by converting millions of books to scannable, digital format has fueled this discussion. Will books fade from our lives? Will they be replaced with computers and hand-held devices? How will this effect speed reading?
First a word about speed reading. There is much that is misunderstood about it and recent speed reading graduates often find themselves questioned by family and friends. But it is difficult to argue with the results. Speed readers remember nearly all they read, they go through ten or fifteen articles while a slow reader barely finishes two, and they are comfortable with being surrounded by mountains of information. They confidently know they can go through it any time they want to.
How fast does a speed reader read? Slow readers, taught by well-meaning teachers in elementary schools around the world, barely read 150 to 250 words per minute with 72 percent comprehension at best. After a 2-day workshop and a few weeks of practice, speed readers replace their slow reading behaviors with a suite of skills designed to match up their information intake with the way their brains want to see it. Speed readers don't fall asleep while they read, a sure sign that your brain is bored. They don't find learning a chore. Learning is exciting, easy, and is done without fear or stress. They can read anywhere from 500 words per minute to thousands.
I have been around computers since the first computers hit workplace desks. I spent 20 years working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on space exploration missions, so computers have been part of my entire adult life. Even in high school, back in 1971, I was privileged to take a rare computer class where I learned computer programming and typed out my lines of code on paper tape and punch cards. It took a week before I saw my results, but it was exciting!
I have worked off of 3-inch orange and green CRT screens right up to the modern, super high resolution LED screens like on the 17-inch laptop screen I am looking at as I write this. And for part of my week, I give tours of the Microsoft Home, a home of the future with technology that might be available in the next five or ten years. In the Home, I am surrounded by displays that appear on the kitchen counter, on the bulletin board, and on the wall of the dining room.
But in spite of it all, I prefer books. Books are special and so far, no electronic format has been devised to take their place. E-book readers are a start, but they have none of the attributes that make a book special.
When I hold a book in my hand, I know I have the entire treatise of the author right there. I can feel the weight of it, the smell of it, and most importantly, I can look through any part of it easily. Having the entire piece right in front of me is important and I think it may be the critical element missing from electronic formats. There are many times when I read something that gets me thinking about something else, maybe something that is 50 pages away from where I am in the book. I know it is there because the first step of the speed reading process is to look at every page in the book before I start reading. That way, I get a truly holistic sense of the book and where it is going.
Part of the beauty of speed reading, and why our brains like it so much, is that it gives you that powerful ability to look at the book as a whole. No longer are we constrained by reading one word at a time, hoping that the author's ideas will build up by the time we reach the end. They rarely do.
Electronic formats so far give you one page at a time, locking you in to the old way of reading. I want to be able to flip through, skim, and bounce around in a book. Not all books we need to read are novels where you often want the story to unfold. Many books we need to take in are complex collections of an author's beliefs, discoveries, and conclusions that don't always need to be digested in order. Speed reading gives you that power, but current e-book readers take it away.
I don't know how to solve that problem in e-book readers. Even the Star Trek universe shows people hundreds of years from now with small format screens digesting one page at a time. I am concerned that young people growing up in our electronic age will lose the ability to examine problems holistically, will fail to see the big picture, and be content with only the partial story that is in front of them in the moment.
But I love it when I am writing and find a digitized book online that I can search, making my writing deeper and richer because of all the perspectives I can include. The digital world can be an important place. I recently sent the two books I have authored to Google for inclusion in their digitization effort.
But I will be collecting books as long as they are available and I will be guarding my precious collection of books from the last century while the digitization machine that is evolving all around us. There are many things that our devices are good for. I have a touch screen phone, a Zune music and video player that I carry around with 120 megabytes of storage space, and most of the time you will see a bluetooth ear bud hanging out my ear. I read millions of words online each week and that is great, to be sure. But the most important collections of ideas in my life are still on paper, bound together with glue, and sitting on a shelf, all there for me whenever I need them, even if the power goes out.
It is a comforting thought.
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