If Paul Scheele, co-founder of Learning Strategies Corporation, had narrated the intro for The Six Million Dollar Man, it would have gone something like this:

“Steve Austin, average reader, a man barely above 200 words per minute. Gentlemen, we can retrain him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first PhotoReader. Steve Austin will be that PhotoReader. Better than he was before. Better, smarter, faster.”

OK, that was kinda cheesy, but PhotoReading really is like getting a bionic implant in your brain. They describe it as getting your reading done in the time you have, at the level of comprehension you need. Paul Scheele developed this system based on his extensive background in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), accelerated learning, and preconscious processing.

Traditional speed reading

Before we get into PhotoReading, let’s first talk about traditional speed reading. This is all about moving your eyes faster across the page. It’s not very complicated at all, and you can start doing it right now by following these tips.

1. Use your finger to keep your place on the page. If you lose your place now and then, you can waste a lot of time reading stuff you’ve already read. Keeping your finger moving also reminds you to keep your reading pace up, and frees up your mind to focus on reading instead of holding your place.

This is such a simple trick, but it’s amazingly effective.

2. Don’t subvocalize. This means that when you read a word, don’t sound it out in your head. Just see the word and your brain will know what it means.

Some people say that subvocalization aids comprehension. I don’t think it helps as much as they say, and anyway, it will stop you from reading much faster than you can imagine a voice in your head.

This is a tough habit to break completely, but it’s not too hard to make some progress if you try.

3. Use your peripheral vision. Moving your eyes all the way from one side of the page to the other makes them tired and slows you down. This is the reason that web pages today have fairly narrow columns, as opposed to web pages from the mid 90s that took up the full width of the screen.

But since you can read a word without focusing directly on it, you don’t need to move your eyes all the way back and forth. If you do that, you’re just wasting your peripheral vision on the margins.

Keep your eyes more to the middle of the page, and use your peripheral vision to read the first few and last few words on each line. (Thanks to Tim Ferriss for this speed reading tip.)

4. Kindle tip: press the “next page” button before you get to the end of the page. Probably the most common complaint I hear about the Amazon Kindle is that the page turning is too slow, despite it being 20% faster in the Kindle 2 than the Kindle 1.

I can only think that these people must be reading all the way to the last word on the page before pushing the button, so that fraction of a second seems like a long time. Instead of doing that, push the button a bit early, timing it so that the page turns right after you finish the last word.

OK, that’s basic speed reading for you. These tips alone will work wonders. For the average person, they will at least double your reading speed, easily.

Beyond just moving your eyes faster

But that’s not really enough, is it? You can only move your eyes so fast, and if you go too fast, your increased speed will come at the cost of reduced comprehension.

The average person reads at 220 wpm, and only 1% of all people can read at 400 wpm. How then, can PhotoReading catapult average readers far past the 1% level? Because it’s not based on moving your eyes faster across the page.

Time for a little reading comprehension test. Go ahead and read this paragraph:

“With hocked gems financing him, our hero bravely defied all scornful laughter that tried to prevent his scheme. ‘Your eyes deceive,’ he had said. ‘An egg, not a table, correctly typifies this unexplored planet.’ Now three sturdy sisters sought proof. Forging along, sometimes through calm vastness, yet more often very turbulent peaks and valleys, days became weeks as many doubters spread fearful rumors about the edge. At last from nowhere welcome winged creatures appeared, signifying momentous success.”

You probably think it makes no sense at all. That’s because you’re missing the context.

In 1971, Dooling and Lachman ran an experiment using this paragraph. Half the subjects read it without being given a title, and had very poor recall. But half the subjects were told that the title was “Christopher Columbus Discovering America,” and for them it made perfect sense.

How did you feel when you read that paragraph, not knowing what it was about? It probably wasn’t much fun. Now, what if you felt the same way as you plowed through an entire book, word by word? At best, you’d be wasting your time. At worst, you’d feel the dread of knowing you weren’t getting the information you need to pass your test or do well at your job.

If you were reading it in context, knowing up front that it was about Christopher Columbus, you would have understood “an egg, not a table” (the world being round, not flat), the three sturdy sisters seeking proof (the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria), the fearful rumors about the edge (falling off the end of the world), the welcome winged creatures (birds, indicating land was nearby), etc. You would have retained much more of it, and I’m sure you would have found it far more enjoyable to read.

I came across this paragraph in a book that had nothing to do with PhotoReading, but I used it here as an example of why reading better isn’t just about moving your eyes faster. It’s about changing the way you read, using your brain the way it works best instead of plowing through the pages with brute force.

What PhotoReading is not

PhotoReading is really a fantastic system. First though, let me talk about what I think are the two biggest downsides. These aren’t really flaws, just limitations you should be aware of.

Whenever PhotoReading is mentioned, you often see a figure of 25,000 words per minute. This needs some clarification. PhotoReading is the name of the whole reading system, as well as one of the specific steps of that system.

The PhotoReading step involves flipping through the pages at a brisk but relaxed pace of about one page per second, not reading, but mentally photographing the pages at about 25,000 words per minute. But because the PhotoReading system involves other steps, your overall reading speed will be much lower. They say it will triple your reading speed, and I think that’s a perfectly fair estimate.

Your reading speed will vary from one book to the next because you have a lot of flexibility in how you apply the system, but tripling your reading speed is no big deal for a PhotoReader. In some cases, it will be much faster.

The other thing is that PhotoReading is not appropriate for all books. When reading a murder mystery, you might want to take your time soaking up every word, and you certainly don’t want to ruin the suspense by reading anything out of order. In that case, normal reading, or perhaps traditional speed reading, would be the way to go.

You would use PhotoReading when you want to extract information out of a book, when your intent is to learn something but not necessarily to enjoy the experience of a beautifully unfolding storyline. Most of us read both kinds of books, so we’d choose the best way to read based on what kind of book it is.

What PhotoReading is

One thing you always have to keep in mind is your goal in reading your book. Is your goal to consciously process every word? No. You might choose to do so, but reading every word is not your goal per se.

Your goal might be something like learning the advantages of the new cover sheets for the TPS reports, so you can decide whether to recommend using them in your department. Your goal will be completely different for each book, and be highly personalized based on what you already know, what you need to know, and how much time you have.

Whatever your goal is, the most efficient way to achieve it is almost certainly not to read every word. In fact, you’ll probably find that only 4% to 11% of the text carries the essential meaning for you.

I know it’s hard to accept that, because we’ve been trained to read every single word, but you can check this for yourself. One of the purposes of PhotoReading is to make it easy to find the parts of the text that are relevant for you, based on what you’re trying to get out of it.

PhotoReading involves a lot of things, and I can’t cover everything here. But one of the most important differences from normal reading is that you don’t just read every word from start to finish in one pass.

Instead, you make multiple passes though it. On each pass, you identify specifically what else you want to get out of the book, and whether it’s worth spending time on that. If so, you focus your efforts on going deeper into the parts you need.

With normal reading, you could read a whole book from cover to cover, only to find that it wasn’t worth reading. With PhotoReading, you improve your comprehension on each iteration, until you reach the point of diminishing returns.

If you read the 10% of the book that contains 90% of the value, why would you want to then read the remaining 90% just to get the other 10% out of it? In the same time it takes to get 100% out of one book, you could get 90% out of 10 books. The main thing PhotoReading does is let you find the most important parts, so you don’t have to read everything blindly.

Does it work?

The most controversial aspect is the PhotoReading step itself. This is the part of the system where you flip through the book, mentally photographing one page per second by looking at them in a certain way.

Paul Scheele acknowledges that you won’t have any conscious recollection of what you’ve mentally photographed. He says you’ve put the information in your inner mind, but you then need to bring it to the conscious mind using specific activation techniques.

I can’t say with any kind of scientific certainty whether the mental photographing works, because I’m not an expert in NLP, accelerated learning, or preconscious processing. I believe that it does, but I can’t prove it.

However, I know for sure that the PhotoReading system would let you read faster with better comprehension even if you skipped the actual PhotoReading step! (Not that you should, but you could.)

Why? Because so much of the system makes sense without any leap of faith. Things like making multiple passes, having a clear purpose, taking an active approach to reading, prioritizing different parts of the material, recognizing core concepts, tailoring your approach to your specific goals, being in the right state of mind while reading, skipping text that is redundant or not relevant to you, mind mapping, associative memory techniques, utilizing a variety of reading styles, and more.

Some people try to discredit PhotoReading because they don’t accept that the subconscious mind can play an important role in reading. That’s certainly understandable, and I don’t really understand that part myself. However, these people are overlooking the many parts of the system that obviously work. Anything that the subconscious mind adds is icing on the cake.

My first real world test of the system happened when I was partway through the 9 CDs, when I went to the library. Normally I check out one book or maybe two. Any more than that, and there’s a big chance that I’ll get sidetracked by something else, and I won’t even start reading some of the books before the due date.

I just started browsing, and before I knew it, I had seven books in my hands. Seven? That was too much, and I thought I’d better put some back. But then I thought no, I’m going to see what happens. Using PhotoReading, I read three of those books later that same day. I breezed through the other four, and I went back for more. Yes, it works.

The verdict

The biggest drawback for me is that in some cases, I just don’t want to use PhotoReading for its intended purpose. That is, I really want to focus on every single word rather than extracting the information that’s important to me. Although when I hear myself saying that, it doesn’t seem to make much sense.

I think it’s tough to break the habit of reading every word, even when you know it doesn’t serve you. While you can use PhotoReading right away, they say you get better over time, and I’d guess that breaking this habit of over-reading is one of the things you get better at.

I’ve never been a scanner by nature, and when I have a good book, I really want to read it slowly. At the same time, I often read books that aren’t a work of art so much as a source of information.

For those books, it’s far better to get the information you need in a fraction of the time, so you can either read more books or have more time for other things. PhotoReading allows you the flexibility to vary your reading style to suit your needs, so I even use some of its techniques on the works of art.

I highly recommend the PhotoReading course, and I haven’t even remotely gone through all the material yet. The 9 CDs alone are terrific. I keep them in my car, and I’ve listened to them several times.

I don’t remember if I got the classic or deluxe version, but what I have also comes with a workbook, the books “PhotoReading” and “Natural Brilliance,” the 3 DVD set “PhotoReading Results Supercharger,” the “PhotoReading Activator” paraliminal CD, and the CD-ROM course “Clear Mind – Bright Future.” All of which I haven’t gotten to yet, and which are above and beyond the CDs that explain the whole system.

If you don’t have the money for it, I hope you got some good tips out of this anyway. But if you can afford the investment, PhotoReading will undoubtedly give a big boost to your reading speed, comprehension, and enjoyment. Try it risk-free, with their money-back guarantee. Of course, if you do, I’ll assume that you can just breeze through these 2,500 word posts.

The Amazon Kindle may seem like just another fancy gadget for techno geeks. But make no mistake, this is the biggest invention since the cell phone. And with the release of the new and improved Kindle 2, it’s even bigger.

Here’s a picture of me holding 245,000 books in one hand. Or more accurately, access to said number of books. The latest version of the Kindle is the width and height of a small book, the thickness of a pencil, and it weighs just 10 ounces. But this little device hooks you up to practically unlimited knowledge. It’s like holding an entire bookstore in your hand. (And on the actual screen, you don’t see any glare like you do in this photo.)

Anytime you feel like reading something, just switch on your Kindle, browse the available listings, and wirelessly download a book in less than a minute, for less than the cost of a paperback. (Sorry, overseas friends – the Kindle is currently available only in the U.S. because of its reliance on Sprint’s 3G network. Verify that Kindle wireless coverage is available in your area.)

This is not some big clunky object. The Kindle 2 has a very sleek design, much better than its predecessor. It’s comfortable to hold, and it doesn’t get hot like a computer. The battery charges in 4 hours and lasts 4 days. It’s easy to use, with no technical skills needed. There are no contracts or anything to sign up for (assuming you already have an Amazon account). You really just take it out of the box and follow the simple on-screen guide to get started.

But what’s so great about this?

How is a Kindle that much better than just carrying a book around with you? Well, the difference is that with the Kindle, you’re not carrying around one book, but up to 1,500. (If you actually download that many books, you can delete them to free up space, and re-download them for free later.) Never again will you have an excuse for having nothing to do, or not knowing what book to take on a trip with you.

Here’s an example of how you might use it. You arrive at the airport, and find that your flight’s been delayed by 4 hours. Other people might be upset in that situation, but not you, because you have a Kindle.

You pull it out of your carry-on bag, and flip the switch. Two seconds later, the Kindle automatically loads the book you were reading last, opened to the exact page you were on. You were near the very end of the book, so you quickly finish it. What next? With a nearly infinite selection available, you feel like a kid in a candy store.

You remember people saying good things about Tribes by Seth Godin, so you decide to take a look. You press the Menu button and select “Shop in Kindle Store.” There are handy links to national best sellers, Kindle top sellers, and Amazon’s recommendations for you, as well as options to browse books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs.

You browse the book selections, and instead of choosing one of the 24 categories, you just type “Tribes” into the search engine. The Amazon rating and reviews for Tribes come up, but you’re more interested in downloading the free sample chapter. And you like it, so you decide to buy the book.

Your Kindle-less friends paid $13.57 plus shipping, and waited for 5 days. But you’ll pay just $9.99 and be reading it in less than a minute. (New releases are generally $9.99, even if the print version is $25 or more. Some cost less, and some are even free.)

While everyone else is twiddling their thumbs or trying to sleep on the airport benches, you’re soaking up Seth Godin’s wisdom and not even noticing the passage of time.

At first, I basically saw the Kindle as a fun and easy way to read more books. I really don’t read enough, and I know I’m going to be reading more now that I’ve got convenient, nearly unlimited access wherever I go. I’ll expand my knowledge, and thanks to the free sample chapters offered for many books, I’ll be able to take no-risk looks beyond the topics I usually read about.

However, I found the Kindle to be even better than I expected. I thought it would be the next best thing to having a real book, but it’s actually far superior to a printed book in several ways. For one thing, the readability is just amazing.

The picture above shows someone reading her Kindle in bright sunlight, without any glare. You can tilt it at any angle, and the text is always sharp and clear (more so than it appears in this picture). Sun or shade or indoors, it all works. You don’t need a great light source like you do with a printed book. There’s no backlighting you so can’t read it in total darkness, but pretty much any indoor location will be bright enough.

There are six different font sizes to choose from, so you can pick the one that’s best for your eyes. There are 16 shades of gray, so pictures look good. It really is gentler on your eyes than a computer screen, or even a printed book. The narrow column helps you read faster and not lose your place.

Read it in bed just like a regular book. You don’t need to turn any pages – just push one of the “next page” buttons that will naturally be under either of your thumbs. You don’t need a bookmark either – set it down when the phone rings and it will eventually go into power save mode, but it will never lose the page, even if you turn it off or start reading another book.

You can search within the book, mark sections to come back to later, and type up notes while you’re reading. Move the cursor to any word, and the built-in dictionary gives you a definition. You can have the Kindle read to you with its text-to-speech feature, but it sounds as bad as a GPS unit, and I don’t see why anyone would use this unless they have severe vision problems. You also have web access (currently in the experimental stage), though I found using Wikipedia to be painfully slow.

The Kindle also has a number of advanced features that I don’t really need, like the ability to take a Word or PDF document on your computer and email it to your Kindle account, having it converted to Kindle format for a charge of ten cents. But the advanced features stay out of your way, and don’t interfere with the basics.

Things the Kindle could do better:

1. When someone’s Kindle arrives on their doorstep, they’re eager to get started immediately. And while it’s easy to learn how to use it, you’ll quickly run into the problem of not having any books on it. Needing to stop and decide what book to start with really breaks your momentum. The Kindle should come with some books to get you started. Why not give the user Kindle access to all the books they’ve previously bought from Amazon?

2. They need to expand their selections, but of course they’re already working on that. They’ve got a huge number of books already, but if you’re looking for something in particular, it might not be available on the Kindle.

3. With the profit margins being so high on electronic books, they can afford to offer package deals. Like the complete works of Michael Crichton, for a huge discount.

4. The Kindle really needs a carrying case. While it’s easy to hold, it’s not so easy to take with you, because the way you would naturally carry it would put a thumbprint on the screen. I see now that there are some fancy cases available on Amazon, but the Kindle should at least come with a cheap pouch just so you have something protecting the screen. If I were to take it on a plane right now, I’d stuff it in my carry-on after wrapping it in saran wrap!

Is it worth the price?

The Kindle 2 sells for $359, the same as the Kindle 1 sold for. So far, they’ve focused on making the new model much better instead of bringing down the price. The Kindle 2 looks and works great, so I don’t see a need to wait for the next one.

Some people balk at the price, but I think it’s perfectly reasonable. Remember the $600 iPhone and PlayStation 3? Don’t forget that you’ll save money on books. If you buy 24 books at $9.99 on the Kindle instead of $24.99 for paperbacks, the Kindle pays for itself.

I know, it would take a while for that to happen, but the point of the Kindle isn’t to save money on books. It’s to immerse you in knowledge, insight, thought, and entertainment wherever you go. That’s worth a few hundred bucks to me.

Oh, and for your first Kindle book, consider UR, Stephen King’s $2.99 novella written exclusively for the Kindle. It’s about an English teacher who orders a Kindle after his ex-girlfriend asks him, “Why can’t you just read off the computer like the rest of us?”

Yesterday there was a post on PickTheBrain titled Improve Your Writing with a Conversation Tone. What I found most interesting about it was the link to the Readability index calculator, which scans text you enter in order to calculate the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade level.

The Reading Ease score is typically 90 for comics and 10 for legalese. Time magazine is about a 52, and Reader’s Digest is about a 65. The Grade level is theoretically the grade you have to reach in order to understand the text, but it’s not perfect: Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham gives a grade level of -1.3. Both Reading Ease and Grade are based on the number of words per sentence and the number of syllables per word, but these measures are weighted differently by the two formulas.

When you write posts that a 10th grader can understand, that doesn’t mean you’re dumbing them down because you think your audience couldn’t make it through 10th grade. It means you’re avoiding pretentious words and convoluted sentences so you sound more like a person and less like a textbook. The less effort it takes people to figure out what you’re trying to say, the more they can ponder what you’re saying. Of course, some situations require complex language, but in general, we should try to avoid it.

I’m subscribed to 48 blogs, and I decided to put them to the test. Out of the 48, I find 13 of them especially enjoyable to read, and I find 8 of them especially painful to read (I read those 8 either because they have very good information, or they’re very popular and I’m still trying to figure out why). It occurred to me that the blogs I find enjoyable to read would probably have high readability scores, so I decided to conduct an interesting (though highly unscientific) experiment.

To save time, I only tested the 13 most enjoyable blogs and the 8 least enjoyable blogs (in a slightly narcissistic move, I included my own blog among the most enjoyable). I used the most recent post from each blog, unless it was a guest post, contained a lot of quoted material, was too short, or was otherwise unusual, in which case I moved on to the next most recent post.

The results were what I expected for the most part: the blogs I liked generally had the highest readability scores, while the blogs I didn’t like generally had the lowest scores. Here are the rankings for the top ten most readable blogs I subscribe to, after filtering out two that I don’t like reading, sorted by Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score (with a secondary sort by Grade level and a tertiary sort by blog name).

#1: brip blap (Reading Ease score: 64; Grade level: 8)

#2: zenhabits (Reading Ease score: 62; Grade level: 8)

#3: Seth’s Blog (Reading Ease score: 61; Grade level: 9)

#4: Hunter Nuttall . com (Reading Ease score: 60; Grade level: 9)

#5 (tie): Conrad Hees’ Blog (Reading Ease score: 57; Grade level: 9)

#5 (tie): Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development Blog (Reading Ease score: 57; Grade level: 9)

#7: Early Retirement Extreme (Reading Ease score: 56; Grade level: 11)

#8: Skelliewag.org (Reading Ease score: 52; Grade level: 10)

#9: Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek and Lifestyle Design Blog (Reading Ease score: 50; Grade level: 10)

#10: On Moneymaking (Reading Ease score: 50; Grade level: 11)

(Had the list been sorted by Grade level before Reading Ease score, Early Retirement Extreme would be pushed down to #9.)

The blogs I’m subscribed to that I don’t take pleasure in reading had Reading Ease scores around 40, and Grade levels around 14. So the message is clear: be easy to understand, and people will like listening to you.