Stephan Miller

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No Time To Read

I don’t know about you, but I don’t get that much time to read. I used to read all the time. Now I get eye bites. Short glimpses of paragraphs. Reading half of a book and then figuring out the rest for myself.

But I have a lot I want to read and 100% of what I am able to accomplish online is due to the fact that I force myself to continue my education at all times. I grew up in a city where a good job is in construction or a factory and assumed from the intellectual level of all the adults that I met that a brain somehow rotted after high school. I didn’t want mine to rot, so I always had at least one book I was reading.

When I started make money from what I learned, I turned up the heat a little bit. Then I had a family. It is their time now. But I still want to keep this education going. It’s the only way to stay at the forefront of new things. So I’ve downloaded a lot of ebooks and they are there on my desktop right now.

I keep everything I access a lot or want to read on my desktop. About a month ago, I had to shrink the icons so that everything could fit without bumping into each other.

Speed Reading

I bought the Evelyn Wood book. I have on the bookshelf. I just didn’t have the time to read it. If only I learned it before I read it. I have tried other methods of speed reading before and always gave up.

For one, there are advantages and disadvantages to reading faster. I want to become a better writer. So there are some books I want to read slow enough to absorb the rhythms and tone of the writer’s voice. Blasting along at 500 words per minute will not help me accomplish this goal. I want to hear my voice in my head repeating the words. I can learn to read faster but I am not sure if I can learn to listen that much faster.

For another, most of the stuff I want to read just for info is in digital format. If is has do with the internet and it’s printed on paper, it’s out of date before it was printed. It is a little different trying to speed read on a computer. I am damn sure not going to drag my finger down the center of my LCD screen, plus when I tried, I couldn’t see through the pretty color bubbles my finger made.

Audio Books

I listened to audio books religiously on the way to and back from work for a while. I wanted to learn how to invest and save some of the money I was making, make it work for me and being a hands on guy, I wouldn’t settle for a 401K. I wanted to learn how the stock market works.

But I ran into a issue. I am a limited tech guy. I am always on the internet, but I don’t have an Ipod. Mine is still called an MP3 player. I used it only for audio books. The issue: once you get to the middle of the book, it takes about ten minutes to fast forward to where I was at.

So I looked for MP3 players for audio books with some type of "start where I was last time" function. I never really found much. So if anyone has a solution to this let me know.

Rapid Reader Saves the Day

When I read a post over at Yaro Starak’s blog about a few worthwhile free reports where he recommended RapidReader, I thought, "Yeah, right."

But I tried it and I’ll be damned if I am not going to buy it after the free trial is up. Rapid Reader basically takes pdf files, word files, or test files and feeds them word by word onto the screen at whatever rate you choose.

I started out at 250 WPM. It was only a minute or so before I kicked it up to 300 WPM. And then I was up to 350 WPM. I think I will leave it there for a while.

It’s amazing how much reading material you can go through at this rate. I have already cleared two pdf books off of my desktop.

I learned to hit the spacebar every once and while to take notes. The spacebar stops the reader and hitting it again starts it back up.

There was one issue. I know that in Adobe PDF, the headers and footers are a separate entity in the page. I wish the reader could learn to skip them. Instead, it repeated them with every page.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. You can download a free, fully functional trial and then decide when you are done. If you have a lot of reading material to go through and it helps you out, then buy it. If not, no loss. That’s the good thing about shareware.

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