We're in early-stage talks with some companies in the ebook space—DRM obviously forces us to deal with the owners of various walled gardens. We'd love to find a popular, DRM-free, ebook platform. Suggestions welcome!
The main one is Gutenberg, but Beeline users can just install it and make it work on the gutenberg site. You could still contact them to get them to add it as a feature.
Is this based on open research or is the idea of gradients over text itself the patent-pending invention?
I'd love to integrate this with my iOS speed-reading app (http://velocireaderapp.com). Any interest in collaborating on a spin-off iOS app, to read, say, DRM-free ePubs? My contact info is in my profile.
I was ready to call B.S. on this but after actually seeing it in action, it seems very reasonable. I wonder why this hasn't been done before. I happen to skip lines very often, I'll definitely try this out.
EDIT: Some feedback after reading a Cracked article with it.
First of all, since the inception of the Readability bookmarklet I've always read online articles with some kind of tool (I started with Readability, then passed to the Safari version and now I've been using Clearly for quite some time and I'm pretty happy about it) and now I'm so used to it that if a particular article doesn't render properly, I just straight out don't read it. The first thing I noticed is that the coloration is applied even to single-line titles, I would do away with it and (maybe) apply it only on multi-line paragraphs' titles. The other thing that irked me is that small images are put on the left side instead of being centered, even worse is the fact that text appears on the right side of the images; I would follow Clearly steps in this regard and always put the text under the centered images. Lastly, I would reduce the text area to 600px of width or better yet, dynamically size it so as to accommodate around 60 characters. As far as I can tell, you totally nailed the font size.
I tend to skip lines or re-read lines when reading, and I was surprised at how applying this gradient helped me continuously read their homepage. Definitely going to see how I can use this to improve my reading comprehension!
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback—we are talking with Evernote about Clearly integration. They have a great platform and we hope to integrate with them soon!
It is a problem, especially for beginning readers who struggle to comprehend as they're reading and don't have the 'bandwidth' to parse the incorrect sentence and find their place in the text on the fly. Stressful situations (tests, public reading in front of the class, etc) likely make this worse.
Personally, I am not a fan of this "reader". The changing color is a distraction to my reading experience. The scheme I found the least distracting was the "Gray" scheme. But, I am not someone who would use it. Interesting concept though - I hadn't thought about it earlier.
My gut feeling (and the websites I enjoy reading, and what I recently did to my blog) is that line skipping is due to too long lines combined with little font-size and line height. But of course, not all eyes/eye-brain systems work the same, and I'm sure this will be more helpful to some than larger fonts with larger line heights.
Line height, line width, and font size, are the 3 elements of a body of large text that must be balanced. There is some basic arithmetic to this, and it appears everyone seems to ignore it. (HN's design is a perfect example of the 'meh' attitude toward readability.)
Heh, read it (it's in my Instapaper for some future referenc since it appeared first heree) But when I did the redesign I just went with the flow and what I saw nice on my screen. After all, what I write in my blog works as future reference for me, too :)
I'm initially inclined to dismiss this as ugly and distracting, especially with the default colors being very similar to the traditional link/visited HTML colors. It would be worth exploring further if the claimed improvements are true.
I'd especially be interested in exploring ways to incorporate this into better designed color schemes so that it doesn't look so much like a unicorn vomited on the page while preserving the benefits and usability.
I'm also less inclined to dismiss improvements like these after misinterpreting the occasional email from colleagues lately. I don't know if it is assuming I know the full contents from the 3 line summary on mobile devices, processing too much email, or simply not paying enough attention but I've had to slow down and make sure I get things right.
"Nice" colorschemes are probably less useful here since nice usually means harmonious. The point is to maximize your brain's ability to unconsciously distinguish them, so red/blue is a good choice if you need a lot of help. If you're more sensitive to colors, then the grayscale is probably a better choice.
This is a great idea, a subtle mix of the gradients and some readers' select-a-few-lines-at-a-time habit.
Or, to mix in another idea (from philip1209) downthread: have the hover-effect add color-matched dots (or other glyphs) at the corresponding line-ends, currently under the pointer.
that would be very annoying when reading on any touch based device. Even on a normal laptop - most people who can read well enough dont need to follow the text with the cursor anyways .. its just adds an unnecessary action that would work against the goal of this concept - speeding peoples reading up!
Applying the gradient when you select text might work. For some reason I already have a habit of obsessively selecting text when I am reading, and I've seen other people that do it as well.
Having recently looked into speed reading a bit, this seems to do a quite good job at filling the role of a pacer without actually requiring any manual interaction by the reader. Nice work! Easily beats trying to pace yourself with the mouse cursor or text selection at least, while actually preserving pages mostly as-is.
When speed reading, this doesn't seem particularly effective. Perhaps a dot at the end of the line with a particular color that corresponds to a dot of the same color preceding the following line would be better for those who minimize eye movements.
I find it counterintuitive that this helped experienced readers more. It didn't make a difference for me in their test, and I read constantly. I would suspect this line coloring would help a less experienced reader more.
I can't believe it but it is faster and more enjoyable to read with the gradients. I can't get the bookmark to work with firefox. Extension would be great!
>A study designed and carried out at Stanford University showed an average reading speed increase of over 10 percent for first time users of BeeLine Reader. Many seasoned users experience speed increases of 25 to 30 percent!
So why isn't the study linked?
Regardless of whether or not the claims are true, who in the hell decided for red and blue for the demo's default? The blues/grays themes look okay. IMO, saturated red and blue and probably the two worst colors to use together in a design.
I took their test and came out 2% faster (likely statistical noise more than actual improvement). Regardless, I attribute the improvement to the obscure content in the non beeline reading passage.
I did the test and came out 37% ahead. I was surprised.
That said, I often find myself fiddling with the cursor to mark my place when I'm reading something long, so the idea that extra indicators of place might help doesn't surprise me.
I feel better line spacing might also help - their test seemed to have the lines pretty tight together, although I'm not surprised a test would be designed to best showcase their software.
I had basically the exact same experience. I'm a bit dubious about whether this actually helps on a computer, since I can just use my mouse cursor to track lines.
With a sample of that size there is no way 2% is significant. You're talking about 1 or 2 seconds right? Mine was 50% or more. Maybe I'm extremely distractable.
I had a similar thought when I read the texts.
The first (b&w) text was just harder to comprehend due to esoteric words, lack of thought direction, and several personas. I couldn't understand what author was trying to say.
The second (colored) text was about a female teacher and had a common vocabulary and a straight-forward theme with one character.
According to them I read 11% faster. Although I guessed on 2 out 3 questions, compared to knowing all 3 from b&w text.
Thus, I call BS on their testing experience. These two texts are way too different. And picking an easier one for beeline text does a disservice to this hopefully legit fast reading method.
Actually, the test randomizes which passage you receive in which color. So if you got the "harder" one in Beeline, you might have the opposite experience. (I've tried it a couple times to see how it works...)
The passages do not have the same number of words, so just looking at the number of seconds isn't sufficient. You have to use the word counts for each in order to get the words/min.
The bright color scheme was selected so that it's really obvious to first-time website visitors what's going on. When we read with the bookmarklets, we don't use the bright color scheme—usually it's greyscale or blue/purple.
It said I had a 15% increase. not too sure about that, but one thing i definitely did notice was that was I kept reading the beeline sentence my brain was 'remembering' what I had just read.
I 'constantly' have to re-read entire paragraphs because I realised I've looked at them without really taking anything in. It was really strange to feel like i was processing the text as I was reading it.
Although it is fair to have an opinion about this based on personal experience, remember that performance when reading is a personal matter (anecdotal evidence: the crowd that highlights text for reading [1]; scientific evidence: dyslexia).
So it is good to remember that it might or might not work depending on the way your individual brain works, independently of what the person next to you gets from it.
I definitely noticed that I could read faster with this. And the colors were super obnoxious, so grayscale was my choice. What I would really appreciate was if it could be done without taking it out of the page I was already on.
I would really appreciate some way for it to automatically do it and not take me to a new page, maybe something I could install into my browser?
What about a JavaScript version sites could use as a library? (My personal website is text-heavy and might benefit from a very subtle version of this, but I can't A/B test a browser extension.)
I tried their test and had no improvement in reading speed. I also use my mouse to read on a desktop (highlight end of one line and start of the next) as I go, so I think this product is just not made for me.
The testing methodology is quite flawed (at least for the reading speed test on the site). It asks you to read a passage with BeeReader to start out. When you're done, you're presented with questions about the passage before reading a non-BeeReader passage.
The catch is, you will almost certainly read the second passage slower than the first, since you're now looking to retain information for the questions!
The colored passages _feel_ faster, but I'm not sure that counts for much.
It did tell you it was gonna ask questions. Anecdotally I read the second paragraph faster because I had an idea of the difficulty-level of the questions involved. (ie not very)
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadI'd love to integrate this with my iOS speed-reading app (http://velocireaderapp.com). Any interest in collaborating on a spin-off iOS app, to read, say, DRM-free ePubs? My contact info is in my profile.
EDIT: Some feedback after reading a Cracked article with it.
First of all, since the inception of the Readability bookmarklet I've always read online articles with some kind of tool (I started with Readability, then passed to the Safari version and now I've been using Clearly for quite some time and I'm pretty happy about it) and now I'm so used to it that if a particular article doesn't render properly, I just straight out don't read it. The first thing I noticed is that the coloration is applied even to single-line titles, I would do away with it and (maybe) apply it only on multi-line paragraphs' titles. The other thing that irked me is that small images are put on the left side instead of being centered, even worse is the fact that text appears on the right side of the images; I would follow Clearly steps in this regard and always put the text under the centered images. Lastly, I would reduce the text area to 600px of width or better yet, dynamically size it so as to accommodate around 60 characters. As far as I can tell, you totally nailed the font size.
Please give more options for colors and gradients. I'm sure everyone has different tastes and habits.
Huh.
PS - I am a voracious reader.
Line height, line width, and font size, are the 3 elements of a body of large text that must be balanced. There is some basic arithmetic to this, and it appears everyone seems to ignore it. (HN's design is a perfect example of the 'meh' attitude toward readability.)
I think this article does a good job of visually explaining this balance and how to accomplish it: http://www.pearsonified.com/2011/12/golden-ratio-typography....
I'd especially be interested in exploring ways to incorporate this into better designed color schemes so that it doesn't look so much like a unicorn vomited on the page while preserving the benefits and usability.
I'm also less inclined to dismiss improvements like these after misinterpreting the occasional email from colleagues lately. I don't know if it is assuming I know the full contents from the 3 line summary on mobile devices, processing too much email, or simply not paying enough attention but I've had to slow down and make sure I get things right.
What I'm worried about is comprehension.
Or, to mix in another idea (from philip1209) downthread: have the hover-effect add color-matched dots (or other glyphs) at the corresponding line-ends, currently under the pointer.
Moving the mouse/cursor down the page line at a time to read? _Seriously?_
This thing combines the old Readability bookmarklet with the gradient. I saw the improvement right away, following the line is much easier now!
tl;dr - this is awesome!
So why isn't the study linked?
Regardless of whether or not the claims are true, who in the hell decided for red and blue for the demo's default? The blues/grays themes look okay. IMO, saturated red and blue and probably the two worst colors to use together in a design.
I'm curious what others experienced?
That said, I often find myself fiddling with the cursor to mark my place when I'm reading something long, so the idea that extra indicators of place might help doesn't surprise me.
I feel better line spacing might also help - their test seemed to have the lines pretty tight together, although I'm not surprised a test would be designed to best showcase their software.
According to them I read 11% faster. Although I guessed on 2 out 3 questions, compared to knowing all 3 from b&w text.
Thus, I call BS on their testing experience. These two texts are way too different. And picking an easier one for beeline text does a disservice to this hopefully legit fast reading method.
Then I took it again with a different subject but I timed it.
It took me ~81 sec to read the colored, ~92 to read the black. It said I read 23% faster with BeeLine. What gives?
i found the colors to be rather distracting and not helpful. the results of two tests taken seem to agree with that.
A couple of problems: 1) beelining doesn't work well with links in text 2) Doesn't work on Hacker News at all.
Then I read it. Fast. Consuming nearly at a paragraph at a glance when I usually can digest only a fragment of a sentence up to a couple of sentence.
It's not attractive, but it is clever and innovative - well done!
I 'constantly' have to re-read entire paragraphs because I realised I've looked at them without really taking anything in. It was really strange to feel like i was processing the text as I was reading it.
Not usable for sites, but very much so for articles
So it is good to remember that it might or might not work depending on the way your individual brain works, independently of what the person next to you gets from it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4839436
I would really appreciate some way for it to automatically do it and not take me to a new page, maybe something I could install into my browser?
The catch is, you will almost certainly read the second passage slower than the first, since you're now looking to retain information for the questions!
The colored passages _feel_ faster, but I'm not sure that counts for much.
Perhaps the aggregate A/B numbers make a more compelling case for using BeeReader?
I wonder if the color combo choice has any affect on the speed/comprehension of the text.