tl;dr As a hackathon project at our recent team offsite, Mati and I hacked together a quick experiment to test whether Bionic Reading actually works.

Does Bionic Reading actually work? Test for yourself!

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2022-06-21 17:00:06

tl;dr As a hackathon project at our recent team offsite, Mati and I hacked together a quick experiment to test whether Bionic Reading actually works. Initial results suggest not, but there are some glimmers in the data justifying a revised experiment correcting the mistakes of our pilot study. If you have 10 minutes to read two Paul Graham essays, you can test whether Bionic Reading helps you read faster here: speed.readwise.io.

Over the past few weeks, we've been slammed by one of the bizarrest feature requests we've ever gotten since working on Readwise: please bold the first few letters of each word so I can read faster.

This isn't just some one-off request. I've received more tweets, DMs, emails, Discord messages, and survey responses in our history requesting — nay, fiending — that we implement Bionic Reading in our new reading application.

If you're reading this, I assume you already know what Bionic Reading claims to deliver: faster reading speeds with no loss of comprehension.