Last week, I decided to perform an experiment. At midday precisely, I sat on my couch to see if I could knock off a Man-Booker-shortlisted novel by teatime.
That’s not as easy as it sounds. The book I picked was To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris – at 110,000 words or so, it’s not particularly lengthy, but given that the average adult reader clocks in at between 250 and 300 words per minute (according to a 2012 study), it would still take around six hours to finish. And that’s without considering the weighty subject matter: a Manhattan dentist dealing with a crisis of faith after a religious group steals his identity. Clearly, demolishing it by three or four o’clock was somewhat ambitious.
To help me along, I called on Spritz. Developed by a Boston company of the same name, it’s an add-on for e-reader apps that aims to let you blitz through a book at up to 1,000 words per minute (wpm), a speed comparable with competitive speed-readers. The technology behind Spritz is fascinating. The company claims that each word we read has what’s known as an Optimal Recognition Point. Process that, and you grasp the meaning of the word much faster. With Spritz, this means that a single letter in each word is highlighted in red. The words are displayed in large type on your screen, appearing in rapid succession at any speed you like. It’s been in development for some time, but has only recently become available for mobile use, on iOS and Android (or at least, the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Gear 2).
Ferris’s hero, Paul O’Rourke, is a defiant technophobe. He’s a proud luddite who refuses to have a Facebook page and nurtures a mighty distrust of Google, so it seems a little perverse to read his story on an iPhone using a specialised speed-reading app. But what’s immediately clear is that Spritz works beautifully. The big problem with speed reading is comprehension – Anne Jones, the current top competitive speed reader, set a 2001 competition record of 2,246wpm with a 60% comprehension rate. With Spritz, that isn’t a problem. I started off at a relatively mild 350wpm, but soon graduated to a cruising altitude of 600wpm. And I was understanding all of it.
Ferris is a cracking writer, but he does have a tendency to veer off into lengthy digressions about religious doctrine, or philosophising from the curmudgeonly O’Rourke. Not a problem: I was retaining everything. And by the time one o’clock rolled around, I was up to 650wpm.
That’s not to say Spritz is without problems. Dialogue is bewildering at such a clip. Plug a book by Elmore Leonard or George Pelecanos into Spritz, and you’ll lose the plot in minutes. And the tech has a real problem with repeated words. At one point, O’Rourke reflects on the vacuous activities available in New York City, musing on how he could walk into a bar and “drink Pinot until bohemianism and Billie Holiday worship saturated my soul and I was drunk, drunk, drunk”. When Spritz tried to run those last three words, the on-screen text appeared to stall temporarily as it displayed words with identical commas after them. For a moment, the app looked profoundly confused, as if it had also had a little too much Pinot.
Around three o’clock, I really ran into bother. I was still retaining everything, but I was in agony. Spritz demands total concentration, especially at higher speeds. Look up for one second at 700wpm, and you lose eleven words – and trust me, when O’Rourke gets deeper into investigating why the Ulm religious group is tweeting and Facebooking in his name, these are not words you can afford to miss. My eyes were aching. My fingers had locked, claw-like, around my phone. And although I tried to take breaks, my neck was starting to ask very pointed questions about why I was putting it through this.
I read the last quarter of the novel in a kind of determined stupor. By the time O’Rourke wraps up his quest, a changed man in Israel, I felt as though I had walked there with him – and not in a good way. Taking breaks into account, my total reading time was four hours, 13 minutes.
Spritz is a fantastic tool, but it’s just not ready for novels. Reading a book – and especially one as complex as Ferris’s – isn’t just about comprehension or speed. Spritz gives you no chance to linger. Ferris’ exquisite dialogue is not allowed any room to breathe. At the moment, reading a novel on Spritz is like riding a unicycle from Shepherd’s Bush to Brick Lane. You can do it, but there are far more pleasant and logical ways to get there.
If Spritz is going be used as a novel-reading tool, then the technology needs to be able to handle complex, nuanced writing. At the moment, it’s only available on a handful of second-rate reading apps (the one I used was called ReadMe!, with a deliberate exclamation mark). iBooks, Kindle and Nook have yet to adopt it. For shorter documents, or situations where you really need to digest something in a hurry, Spritz is a wonder, a technological marvel. But it has a long way to go before it changes the habits of readers.
