Speedreading from my experiences only work with certain kinds of books. I think they would be good for autobiographies, biographies and (though I haven't tested it yet) maybe histories. I have a feeling histories would work. I've had a book by H.G. Wells called The Outline of History that seems interesting enough (And huge to boot at around a thousand or so pages). Maybe once this app gets working again I'll give it a shot with that, though I notice in the book he uses a lot of pictures, so that may be a bad idea. Maybe finally finishing Plutarch's Lives might be a better test.

Or maybe stop procrastinating and finish Typee.

When it comes to fiction or other kinds of nonfiction, I often find speed reading methods rather useless. I read this book a while back:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4667/4667-h/4667-h.htm

through speed reading, I think at around 500 to 600 wpm and can still recall many details about it. I guess as a kind of proof: I think the dude was an idiot for marrying women while still being married to his first wife, no matter how terrible of a wife she might have been. I don't remember if she was the one who had held back from divorce or not, but it took him long enough to finally divorce her as well, nearly being killed by his son. I also felt sorry for one of the other woman who was basically given a biblical style punishment for falling in love with this dude. Times were mad cray back then.

There. Now you have to read the book to see if I'm bullshitting or not. Or look up a summary somewhere.

Meanwhile I speed read Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently and don't remember much of the book, if anything. And I also read Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol that way and all I remember is "Dead as a doornail".

So that's what leads me to believe fiction while speedreading isn't good, at least for me.

So yeah, that's my opinion on speed reading books.