Subscription e-book service Oyster is teaming with Spritz, the speed-reading venture, to offer a sample of its technology to Oyster subscribers. Oyster is offering Stephen Covey’s self-help bestseller, The 7 Habits of High Effective People, for free in the Spritz format.
Spritz is newly launched technology that reformats longform reading content, transforming the act of reading from scanning across a page from sentence to sentence to focusing the eyes on a single spot of streaming words. Spritz reformats reading material, creating a one-word stream that can be adjusted by speed, eliminating the traditional practice of scanning back and forth across a page of text.
Using Spritz technology the reader focuses intently on a single spot as the words quickly appear and disappear in sequence word after word. The founders of Spritz claim that it can boost an individual’s reading speed and, despite general reading research to the contrary, also claim it can increase comprehension. The company received $3.5 million in investment funding earlier this year.
Oyster, the subscription e-book service that gives its members unlimited access to e-books for $9.99 a month, is offering a sample of the Spritz technology at OysterBooks.com/Spritz, a website that allows users to read Covey’s bestseller using Spritz. According to Oyster, using the Sprintz technology will allow you to read the 432 page book in under 2 hours.
While the technology is intriguing, it will be interesting to see how people react to an unusual and utterly unnatural manner of reading. In addition, Spritz offers a Google Glass app that serves to open up Google’s wearable computing device to reading.
An Oyster spokesperson said the technology is only being offered through this special website and not through the Oyster app. “The Oyster team is really looking forward to feedback from their subscribers to eventually consider more collaborations in the future, beyond this one book.”
