Fireside: Speed Reading

You get to the bottom of the page and realise you have no idea what was on it. So you go back and read it again.

Fireside fixes that with a highlight that moves. It runs through the text at a speed you set, one phrase at a time, and the page dims behind it. Your eyes stop wandering because there is only one place to look. Set it to 300 words a minute to read at your usual pace without slipping. Set it to 800 and see.

SPEED READING THAT KEEPS THE PAGE
Other speed readers flash words at you one at a time in an empty window. Fireside never moves your book. The text stays typeset on a real page and the highlight comes to it, so you can slow down, re-read a line, look something up and carry on without losing the thread.

- 100 to 1,000 words a minute, changed whenever you like.
- Follow a marker, an underline, or just the light.
- Dim everything but the phrase you are on, or only what is ahead of you.
- Leave a soft trail behind so you can see where you have been.
- Rest longer on hard words. Breathe at the end of a sentence.

IT BREAKS WHERE YOU WOULD BREAK
A pacer that counts words cuts a phrase in half and hands you the pieces: "the old man / in the corner of / the room said / nothing." Fireside reads the grammar of the sentence and stops at the clause: "the old man in the corner of the room / said nothing." It works the breaks out on your phone, with a model trained on sentences a person chunked by hand. Given 567 sentences it had never seen, it agreed with the human 0.78 of the time. Counting words managed 0.57.

PAPER MODE
Turn on Paper and the screen becomes a sheet. Grain, fibre, and ink that sits down in the page instead of glowing on top of it. Warm stock, kind to your eyes at one in the morning.

Three papers to start - Modern Print, Vintage, Worn Vintage - and eight dials if you want your own. Save yours and it follows you into every book; highlights soak into the sheet and take its grain.

THOUSANDS OF BOOKS, FREE
Open Discover and the whole Standard Ebooks collection is there - Frankenstein, Dracula, Moby Dick, Persuasion - typeset beautifully, public domain, free. Search it all, tap once, and it is in your library. Add any other OPDS catalogue by address.

AND THE BOOKS YOU ALREADY OWN
EPUB. Kindle files (MOBI, AZW3, AZW, PRC, PDB). FictionBook (FB2, FBZ). Comics (CBZ). Markdown, HTML and text. Open one from your files, share it in from another app, or drop it into Fireside's folder - your library is never locked inside the app. PDF is not supported: a PDF is a fixed page, and pacing needs text that reflows.

SET THE PAGE UP THE WAY YOU READ
Nine typefaces, including OpenDyslexic, Atkinson Hyperlegible and Lexend. Size, line height, margins, alignment, hyphenation. Paged or scrolling. Light, sepia, dark, paper - or the publisher's own design. Everything previews live, and your place is kept through every change.

MADE WITH DYSLEXIC AND ADHD READERS IN MIND
Dyslexia-friendly typefaces, and a pacer that can dim the page to the one line you are on. Full TalkBack labelling, your system font size, and Remove animations honoured throughout - including in the pacer, where the fade becomes a cut.

MARK IT UP
Highlight in five colours and five styles - solid, underline, wavy, double, dashed. Attach notes. Search inside a book with fuzzy matching, so you find the half-remembered line. Export the lot as Markdown, CSV or JSON.

WIDGETS, AND A TABLET LAYOUT
Three widgets - a highlight you saved, the books you are part way through, how long you read today. On a tablet or an open foldable, the shelf, the book and its marks sit side by side.

AND IT ADDS UP
A streak for the days you read, your year as a heatmap, hours read, books finished, and your real reading speed - which is where every "time left" comes from.

SHARE A SHELF
Put the books you love on a shelf and send friends the link. They follow along without an account; sharing your own signs you in with Google.

Everything pictured is public domain, from Standard Ebooks.

Recent changes:
Read aloud
Listen to any book in a natural voice that runs on your phone, offline and private.

28 voices, and your own
Hear each voice before you download, and blend your own.

Pace or Listen
Switch as you read, each with its own speed, or start from a selected sentence.

Highlighting while you listen
Underline, marker, dim, or nothing at all.

Simpler controls
Settings in the top corner, Aa for text and page, and controls that stay until you tap.