Fireside: Speed Reading

Read faster and more comfortably. A highlight that moves at your pace, phrase by phrase, on a screen that actually looks like paper. Free, no ads, no account.

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 what happens.

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 where a human would: "the old man / in the corner of the room / said nothing." It works the breaks out on your phone, using a model trained on sentences a person chunked by hand.

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 that stays kind to your eyes at one in the morning.

Three papers to begin with - Modern Print, Vintage, Worn Vintage - and twelve dials if you want your own. Save yours and it follows you into every book. Highlights soak into the sheet and pick up its grain.

THOUSANDS OF BOOKS, FREE Open Discover and the whole Standard Ebooks collection is there - Frankenstein, Dracula, Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, Persuasion - beautifully typeset, public domain, free. Search all of it, 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 plain text. Bring them in from Files, share them in from another app, or drop them into Fireside's own folder - your library is never locked inside the app. PDF is not supported: a PDF is a fixed page, and pacing needs text that can reflow.

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

MADE WITH DYSLEXIC AND ADHD READERS IN MIND Dyslexia-friendly typefaces, and a pacer that can dim the page down to the single line you are on. Full VoiceOver labelling, Dynamic Type, and Reduce Motion honoured throughout - including in the pacer, where the transition 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 will find the line even when you half-remember it. Export the lot as Markdown, CSV or JSON.

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

FREE. NO ADS. NO ACCOUNT. All of it. Nothing to buy, nothing to sign up for, no ads, nothing tracked. Your books, notes and places stay on your phone.

Everything pictured is public domain, from Standard Ebooks.