Home/Compared
Speed reading apps, compared
Every one of these puts a word in a fixed place and moves it faster than your eyes would travel a page. They differ in what you point them at.
Most are readers looking for something to read. This one arrives with 77 books already in it, each costed in hours against a speed it measured from you.
Further down, the comparison that matters more than any of them: how fast each medium actually hands you words, reading against audio against broadcast.
| Liminanotio | Spreeder | Outread | Reedy | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One word at a time (RSVP) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Runs in any browser, nothing to install | ✓ | ✓ | — | — |
| Full books included, ready to read | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Bring your own files | Paste text | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Every book timed to your own reading speed | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Reading pace weighted by each word | ✓ | Settings | — | — |
| Free to start with no account | ✓ | — | Not stated | Free with ads |
A tick is something the product does. A dash means it is not offered, or is not claimed anywhere on that product's own site. Checked 23 August 2026 against spreeder.com, outreadapp.com and Reedy's store listing. Rows where we could not verify an absence were left out rather than guessed at. If something here is wrong or out of date, it is a mistake rather than a position — tell us and it gets fixed.
Data ingestion rate
How fast each medium hands you words
An unlovely way to put it, but it is the number that decides how much you can get through in a life: words actually delivered per minute of your attention. Spoken formats are capped by how fast a person can talk and still be understood. Reading is not.
Times are for 100,000 words — roughly an average novel.
| How you take it in | Words per minute | 100,000 words |
|---|---|---|
| Audiobook or podcast | 155 | 10h 45m |
| Broadcast news | 170 | 9h 48m |
| Silent reading, average adult | 238 | 7h 00m |
| Audio at 2× speed | 300 | 5h 33m |
| Liminanotio readers | — | — |
| You, measured | — | — |
The silent reading figure is from Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies and 18,573 participants — 238 wpm for non-fiction, 260 for fiction, most adults between 175 and 320. Speech rates for narration and broadcast are the ranges commonly reported by voice and presentation guides, taken at their midpoints. Take the speed test and your own rate is added to this table.
About the Liminanotio row. It is an average of people who chose to take a five-stage speed reading test on a speed reading site and got to the end of it. That is not a sample of readers, it is a sample of people who like this sort of thing, and it will read high for as long as the site exists — treat it as an upper bound on what is achievable rather than a figure about anybody in particular. It also cannot exceed 800, because that is the top stage the test offers. The sample size is shown next to it so you can judge it yourself.
Reading beats listening by about half again. 238 against 155 is roughly 1.5×, which over a novel is three and a half hours of your life back.
But audio at double speed beats average reading. 300 against 238. Anyone selling you speed reading without telling you that is selling something. The difference is that 2× is roughly where speech stops being intelligible, while reading has room above it — the top stage of our test runs at 800, and you can find out where you actually sit.
The detail
Row by row
- One word at a time (RSVP)All four put the word in one place so your eyes stop travelling. Outread also offers a guided-highlight mode over ordinary text.
- Runs in any browser, nothing to installOutread is a native app for iPhone, iPad and Mac with no web version. Reedy is an Android app plus a Chrome extension.
- Full books included, ready to readSeventy-seven complete public-domain books here. The others are readers for content you supply — Spreeder pairs your own library with AI book summaries rather than the books.
- Bring your own filesSpreeder, Outread and Reedy all import documents; Outread adds Pocket and Instapaper. Liminanotio takes pasted text but is not a document importer.
- Every book timed to your own reading speedWord counts taken from the text we serve, then divided by the speed you measured, on every book and the catalogue.
- Reading pace weighted by each wordOurs weights by word length, by how common the word is, and by how many times you personally have read it. Spreeder publishes four modes and fourteen tunable settings without detailing them, so this is marked as configurable rather than absent.
- Free to start with no accountSpreeder requires an account and sells lifetime access. Outread does not publish pricing on its site. Reedy is free with advertising and a paid tier.
The honest summary: if you have a folder of PDFs and articles you mean to get through, one of the others is the better tool, because importing is what they are built around. If the thing you have not done is read the books everyone assumes you have read, this one already contains them, knows how long each will take you, and remembers where you stopped in all of them at once.