Bionic reading, a new tool that has just been launched by the Swiss startup company Bionic Reading GmbH, is going viral and everyone wants to try it. It lets you read faster, comprehend more, and be more focused.

What is bionic reading?

▸ The new method takes advantage of the fact that the brain reads faster than the eye.

▸ Bionic reading facilitates the reading process by guiding the eyes through text with artificial fixation points. To make it short: some parts of the words are displayed in bold text.

▸ As a result, you are focusing on the highlighted text (usually initial letters of the words) and your brain completes the rest.

▸ Bionic reading is not the same tool as speed reading technology developed a few years ago by Spritz. Both tools let you read faster, but work differently. Spritz is about reading one word at a time. Bionic reading displays the text on the page the “classic way,” but around 50% of the content is shown in bold.

▸ Bionic Reading company has already released an API, so you can expect multiple applications to appear in app stores for both Android and iPad/iPhone. Two iOS apps already use this technology: Reeder 5 and Lire. They are both RSS readers.

▸ So far, no book reading apps have embraced bionic reading. However, you can manually add bionic formatted books to your book reading app or e-reader. 

▸ In the short guide below, I will show you how to import bionic books to Kindle e-readers and apps.

Read also: Bionic reading – here is everything you need to know – Bionic reading is a free tool that brings an enhanced reading experience to your current e-reading device or app. It will help you read faster and comprehend more.

How to add bionic books to Kindle

This method applies to books that you add to your Kindle from third-party sources, such as sites with free public domain books or independent platforms that offer books without DRM protection.

1. Find the book you want to convert to bionic format and export to your Kindle. It should be in epub format, not mobi. Epub is already accepted by Amazon Kindle. You can also pick up txt or rtf file format.

2. Open Bionic Reading online tool. Click on the “Browse File” button and add the book. The tool will start converting the file. It may take a while.

3. To download the bionic formatted book, click on the arrow icon in the bottom right. Please note that, due to heavy formatting, the bionic books will take up to 50% more disc space.

4. In the dialog box, pick up “EPUB” on the right.

5. Send the file to Kindle using your Kindle email address. Processing the file may take more time than usual.

The bionic formatted book behaves just as any other book in your Android book reading app. You can highlight text and add notes, translate and share passages, or change the reading settings. The only difference is that the bionic book displays around 50% of the text in a bold font.

Tip: I recommend changing the font face to Helvetica to increase readability and comprehension.

Happy reading!

Here is how the book will look like on your Kindle

Here is how the book will look like in your Kindle iPhone app

Keep exploring. Here are other lists and tips:

With Bookly, you’ll be able to keep track of all your books, rate them, set reading goals, and more.

If you’re just getting into the habit of reading, chances are you sometimes find it hard to keep yourself motivated and stick to a routine.

On the other hand, if you’re an avid reader, you might be in desperate need of a good app that would keep up with your readathons. Well, your prayers have been answered – with Bookly, you’ll be able to do all that (and even more).

Bookly is a bit like a mix between a workout-tracking app and Goodreads – it records the time spent while reading, analyzes it, and gives away suggestions on how to improve your reading routine, keeping you motivated all the way through.

How Bookly works

Whenever you start a new book, you can add it by scanning the ISBN code or finding it via the app’s database.

Then, you’re good to go – all you have to do is start a timer every time you read with a simple tap, and Bookly will record and analyze your reading progress over time.

While reading, you can also add quotes and thoughts about the book, set a countdown, or even play relaxing ambient sounds (such as light rain, flowing river, crowded café, and more) to help you focus on reading even better.

After you’re done reading for the day, you can simply press “Stop” and enter the number of pages (or, if reading an ebook, the %) you got to, and Bookly will accumulate the data over time, analyzing your reading habits, speed and progress.

If you’re just getting into the habit of reading, there’s also a number of features to keep you motivated – you can set reading goals and reminders to maintain your reading routine, receive personalized tips on how to improve reading skills, or make reading even more fun with game-like features like levels, rewards and achievements.

The app also automatically generates a neat infographic with all the reading stats for each book you complete, perfect to share on social media.

What’s even more, Bookly also lets you mark a book as lent or borrowed – so that you never lose a book to a forgetful bookish friend again.

Bookly pricing

Bookly is free to download on App Store and Google Play with all the basic features free to use on without an online account or sign up needed.

The Pro version is free with a 7-day trial, after which there are three subscription packages available: a one-month subscription ($4.99), a six-month subscription ($19.99), and a one-year subscription ($29.99).

⇢ Bookly

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Say goodbye to pinching and scrolling around – with Adobe Liquid Mode, you’ll be able to read PDF documents in mobile-friendly formats.

If you’ve ever tried to read a long PDF document on your phone, you know that constantly having to zoom in and pinch the screen is extremely frustrating. Not to mention, it’s virtually impossible to mark and copy lines, or skip back and forth between sections.

But not anymore. Adobe has finally introduced Liquid Mode, a feature that automatically reformats text, images, and tables to make PDF documents easier to read on smaller screens.

All you need to do is press the Liquid Mode button in your Acrobat Reader app – the file is then sent to Adobe’s Document Cloud for processing and, once complete, you’ll be able to enjoy a compact, readable, and hassle-free version of your PDF document.

Powered by Sensei – Adobe’s artificial intelligence engine – Liquid Mode uses AI to automatically analyze and identify parts of a PDF document, such as headings, paragraphs, bullet lists, tables, and images, and convert them into mobile-friendly formats (all, of course, without changing the file itself).

Simultaneously, it creates an “intelligent outline”, with collapsible and expendable sections, searchable text, resizable words, tappable images, and more. Liquid Mode also enables a fair share of customization – readers can tailor font size and spacing between words, characters and lines.

Liquid Mode is available in the free Adobe Acrobat reader app for iOS and Android, including Google Play Store-compatible Chromebooks. Unfortunately, since it is still a developing technology, Liquid Mode is currently limited to PDF documents under 10MB and less than 200 pages long.

⇢ Adobe Liquid Mode

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With Spreed, you’ll be able to double your normal reading speed – all without sacrificing comprehension.

It is estimated that the average person reads at around 200-300 words per minute, with anything quicker than that resulting in loss of comprehension.

Through habits like subvocalizing (sounding each word out in our heads), unconscious re-reading chunks of text and unnecessary eye movements, combined with constantly getting distracted by pop-up videos and ads, we are slowing our reading speed significantly without even knowing it.

But Spreed, the highest rated and most popular Chrome extension of its kind, helps eliminate these hindrances – and lets us enjoy reading news articles, blog posts, emails, Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader books, PDFs and ePUBs twice as fast without sacrificing comprehension.

How Spreed works

After installing Spreed Chrome extension, all you have to do is highlight the passage you want to speed read in Chrome and press Alt+V (or right-click and select Spreed selected text). A pop-up window will appear and immediately start “cleaning out” the text of the article for you.

Spreed displays the article word-by-word in a fixed position, highlighting one letter of each word in orange font to lock your eyes on.

The extension lets you adjust the words per minute, font size, number of words displayed at a time and display colors. You can also track your speed improvement and time saved while using Spreed.

Pro tip! If the WPM seems way too fast, try reading the text at a higher speed and then bring it back down.

Spreed utilizes a visual technique popular among the world’s fastest speed readers called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation. Through displaying the article one word at a time with a fixed focal point for us to focus on, Spreed eliminates eye movement and utilizes peripheral reading to speed up the process even more.

Chances are, it took you around 1.5-2 minutes to read this article. With Spreed, you’d need half as much time.

⇢ Spreed

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Recommend Me a Book is a minimalist, reader-friendly service that shows visitors the first page of a random book.

The catch is that the cover, title, and author can be revealed only when you reach the end of the text.

If you don’t like the opening page of the current book, you can quickly switch to the next one by hitting the “Next Book” button at the top of the text. When you click on it, you’ll see the cover (and compare it to which book you think it is). Plus, there are quick links to the book’s product page on Amazon stores in the US and UK.

To narrow down the selection of books, you can also pick up your favorite genre. Click or tap “Genre” text on the right side of the menu bar. You will be able to choose from 25 categories, including literary fiction, mystery, children’s books, young adult, biographies, but also inspirational and self-help books.

The good thing is that you can save the current genre in your browser. Next time you visit the website, you’ll see only the first pages of books included in this category.

When you enter Recommend Me a Book service, the text is randomly picked for you from a list of popular titles. Over 300 books are available at the moment. You can find the first lines from Franz Kafka’s The Trial and dozens of other public domain classics.

Contemporary books are on the list, as well. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, or Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire are among the featured titles. You can browse them all by clicking “Pick a Cover” text in the menu bar (but the whole fun from guessing the books is gone, isn’t it?).

When you add Recommend Me a Book as a bookmark in your browser and place it, for instance, in the bookmarks bar, you can come back to it every time you need a bit of rest.

I think the service would work even better if it had a browser extension displaying a random first page of a book every time you open a new tab. It would be equally helpful as 100 Million Books we described some time ago.

⇢ Recommend Me a Book

Via Life Hacker.

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Are you looking for a new book to read? There are two ways to do it. One is to browse lists and rankings of all kinds, read the reviews, or follow friends’ recommendations. The other way is to use clever recommendation tools that let discover books in a refreshingly different way.

Recommend Me a Book is one of such tools. It’s a minimalist, reader-friendly service that shows visitors the first page of a random book.

The catch is that the cover, title, and author can be revealed only when you reach the end of the text.

If you don’t like the opening page of the current book, you can quickly switch to the next one by hitting the “Next Book” button at the top of the text. When you click on it, you’ll see the cover (is it the book you thought it was?). Plus, there are quick links to the book’s product page in Amazon stores in the US and UK.

To narrow down the selection of books, you can pick up your favorite genre. Simply, click or tap “Genre” text on the right side of the menu bar. You will be able to choose from 25 categories, including literary fiction, mystery, children’s books, young adult, biographies, but also inspirational and self-help books.

The good thing is that you can save the current genre in your browser. Next time you visit the website, you’ll see only the first pages of books included in this category.

When you enter Recommend Me a Book website, you’ll see the first page of a book randomly picked for you from a list of popular titles. Over 300 books are available at the moment.

You can find the opening paragraphs from Franz Kafka’s The Trial and dozens of other public domain classics. Contemporary books are on the list as well. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, or Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire are among the featured titles.

You can browse all books by clicking “Pick a Cover” text in the menu bar (but the whole fun from guessing the books is gone, isn’t it?).

When you add Recommend Me a Book as a bookmark in your browser and place it, for instance, in the bookmarks bar, you can come back to it every time you need a bit of rest.

The service would work even better if it had a browser extension displaying a random first page of a book every time you open a new tab. It would be equally helpful as 100 Million Books we described a few weeks earlier.

The last thing to note is that the website is mobile friendly, and you can easily open it and read the books on your tablet or a cell phone.

Via Life Hacker.

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How many times a day do you open a new tab in your internet browser? “Too many,” is probably the most common answer.

I have to admit I like blank pages of the newly opened tabs. They are a sign something new is going to be discovered in a moment.

On the other side, looking at the completely blank page is a waste of time. Wouldn’t it be better to replace it with something more useful and a million times more inspiring?

There is a Chrome extension called 100 Million Books. It will turn the wasted time into a friendly reminder to read an interesting book.

The extension, developed by Steve Jain, is brilliant in its simplicity. Every time you open a new tab, you will be presented with a new book to read.

In other words, thanks to this decent Chrome extension, you’re giving yourself the chance to discover new books to read (and actually feel the need to read the book at all) as many times a day as you open new tabs.

The new tab, enriched with 100 Million Books, includes the cover and a short passage of text, to give you the idea of what it’s about. Everything is hand-picked and curated by Steve Jain. Soulless book-recommendation plugins based on your browsing history? No, not this time, not in this extension.

Were you expecting to have links to Amazon or other online stores where you could buy the recommended books? You won’t find such a feature, either. The plugin was not designed to help you buy the books, but to let you feel the need to read them.

Here’s what you can read on the extension’s description page in Chrome Web Store:

This extension is the least intrusive way to inject some good, old-fashioned chance into your intellectual life.

“100 million” doesn’t mean you’ll see a random title from millions available via the extension. This number describes how many books were published in the entire world (it’s currently more than 130 million).

Currently, the extension is available for Chrome only. If you use another browser, such as Safari or Firefox, you can always make 100 Million Books your homepage by adding the link:

100millionbooks.org/standalone

Give a try to Steve Jain’s browser extension, and turn “so many tabs, so little time” into “so many books, so little time.”

⇢ Chrome

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So, you’ve found an interesting book, read enthusiastic reviews on Amazon, and are about to hit the “Buy” button. Wait!

You can always visit your local library and get the same book for free. And if the library also offers ebooks, you can download the title to your e-reader in a matter of minutes.

Now, it’s more convenient than ever. Library Extension for Chrome browser checks whether the book you are browsing on the web is available at your library, and displays a widget with relevant information.

When you install the extension, go to Options, find the library and add it to the list. You can add more than one.

Currently, the extension supports over 3,200 libraries in seven countries: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the Cayman Islands.

From now on, the extension will check the availability of publications – both in print and ebook edition – when you are looking for them on the following sites:

• Amazon,
• Barnes & Noble,
• Goodreads,
• Google Books,
• Book Depository,
• Chapters Indigo,
• AR BookFinder.

When you land on the book detail page on any of these websites, the extension widget will load shortly, with information about the number of available copies, and a quick link to reserve the title.

If your library is offering audiobooks, music, or movies, you should also be able to see the Library Extension widget with the availability status of these items.

The extension is free to use, and you don’t have to register to use it. The Firefox extension is coming soon.

⇢ Library Extension

Via Lifehacker.

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Now, besides Google Translate app that performs translations via Share menu, there is a new, and potentially the best way to do that.

It’s the app, developed by MedCV, and called Inapp Translator. The big promise is that translation happens in the current application – via a pop-up window. No switching between apps any longer.

However, this is also something some users might find too intrusive. To use Inapp Translator, you have to keep it opened – a semi-transparent logo of the app sits in the middle of the screen, no matter which other app you’re currently using. See the screenshot below.

This is perfectly fine, when you are getting ready to read a book in a foreign language, maybe not so good, if you’re doing a lot of other things.

The best part is that the app works in any app that allows users to select text. You don’t need to have the option to share the text, just select it. And, yes, it also works in the Kindle app!

Now, when you want a translation, tap on a text and select as much as you want. The app handles longer passages, not only single words.

Then, simply tap on Inapp Translator logo. A pop-up window come out, with a translation. From its top bar you can select the input language (on the left) and output language (on the right).

One tap to get a translation, one tap to continue reading. Nice, huh?

The application is free… to test. You can download it for free, but after you use it for the first time, close it, and open again, it will ask you to upgrade. The upgrade is pretty expensive, so test the app extensively before dismissing it!

The app is using Microsoft Translator, not Google Translate, because:

Our goal is to keep the app free for everyone. Google Translator API is not a free service anymore while Microsoft translator still provides some limited free usage to start with.

That free usage, as I experienced it, was a couple of translations. Not too much, really. Plus, Microsoft-powered translation is much worse when it comes to the quality. I’d be willing to pay the premium price to have the option to use Google Translate.

Inapp Translator is definitely worth keeping. Improved, more “transparent” design, and Google Translate engine are on my wishlist.

Go check out other tips on Ebook Friendly:

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If you are using a book-reading app that offers an option to send a selected text via email, then you’ll have a chance to collect all the highlighted text outside the app.

A benefit of going this route is that no matter which app you use, and on which device, you will always collect the text in a single, editable document in your Evernote account.

I’ve just created a new IFTTT recipe that does that: collects text sent by email, and tagged with a special word, in a single document on Evernote.

You can personalize the recipe with:

• the tag you use when sending an email – by default it’s set to “highlights”,
• the name of the note – the default is “My highlights” – the note with such a title will be created automatically when a first text is being sent,
• the notebook – it’s set to default.

Now, when you find the text you want to collect, select it, and use “share via email” function.

Send the email to trigger@ifttt.com, and add this special word IFTTT needs to properly execute the recipe. In our case it’s #highlights. You can add the tag either to the title or body of the email, it doesn’t matter. It won’t be passed to the Evernote, anyway.

The outcome will be a bulleted list of all texts sent via email from your book-reading application(s).

You can obviously use this recipe to collect not only book highlights but any text snippets, for instance, ideas, or clippings from webpages.

Use the recipe as many times as you want, just choose a different tag for a different destination document in Evernote.

⇢ IFTTT

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