I used to work for a company that hocked speed reading training software. As a kind of side effect, I learned how to speed read. The thing with speed reading

I used to work for a company that hocked speed reading training software. As a kind of side effect, I learned how to speed read. The thing with speed reading is that you can increase the speed at which you read fairly easily, but your comprehension and recall will suffer greatly. I can probably read 500 words per minute, but comprehension is pretty low (~60%). At that point, it generally isn't worth it. Speed reading is kind of a stressful activity, and there's only a very narrow set of situations in which it makes sense to speed read something. 95% of the stuff that I read, I read for pleasure, and in order to enjoy reading something you have to read it the "old fashioned" way. If you want to teach yourself to speed read, books and the like won't really help much. It is kind of like learning to drive- you really have to just try it yourself. To start, sweep your hand over the words in an "infinity sign" pattern, with the height of each sweep being about 3 or 4 lines high. Don't read the words to yourself, just focus on the words above your finger. After awhile, you'll be able to detach your eyes from the lines, and you can stop sweeping your hand over the page. The key is to take in as much as possible with your eyes, and let your brain assemble everything in the background. You'll eventually get pretty good at associating key nouns with the verbs and adjectives around them. That's pretty much all you need to get 50-80% comprehension with most things. (P.S. I'm not aware of any speed reading methods that don't come with a reduced level of recall/comprehension. I think it is just the nature of the beast.)