Glance shows a book one word at a time, each word lined up on a red focus letter. Your eyes stay in one place while the words come to you, at whatever speed you set.
Your eyes don't glide along a line of text. They stop on a word for about a quarter of a second, jump to the next stop, and every so often jump back to check something they missed.1 While they're moving, you aren't taking anything in.
When you read a page, your eyes stop on a word, take it in and jump to the next stop. Now and then they go back to check something they missed.
Each word is placed so that one letter, a little left of its middle, lands in the same spot every time. That's close to where studies find a word is recognised fastest.2 Your eyes rest there while the book goes by.
| Word length | Focus letter |
|---|---|
| 1 letter | 1st |
| 2 to 5 | 2nd |
| 6 to 9 | 3rd |
| 10 to 13 | 4th |
| 14 or more | 5th |
Pick a speed with the dial and start reading. If you'd rather not guess, the pace test plays short passages and asks one question after each. It nudges you faster when you're keeping up and slower when you miss things, with smaller steps each time, until you settle on a speed you can follow.
The speed is an average, not a fixed beat. Each word stays up in proportion to its length, so “it” flashes by and “discriminative” gets the time it needs. That means you don't have to slow the whole book down for its longest words.
You can change speed at any point while you read, and pause to see the whole paragraph with your place underlined.
The average adult reads about 238 words a minute in non-fiction and 260 in fiction.3 Here's how long the free books on Glance take at a typical 250, and at the speed on your dial with Glance's pauses added back in, so the comparison is fair.
Twenty minutes a day for a year, pauses included
Counting a novel as 90,000 words. All ten books together take at a typical pace and with Glance.
Showing words one at a time is a well-studied idea, usually called rapid serial visual presentation. It has real limits, and Glance is built around them.
Readers who can't glance back at earlier words understand less of what they read.4
In Glance, pause at any moment and the paragraph you're in appears, with your place underlined. Click any word to carry on from there.
A study of the Spritz app found people blinked far less and reported more tired eyes.5
In Glance, there's a short pause at every comma, dash, full stop and new paragraph. The pauses stay the same length however fast you read, so you always get a moment to blink, and you can set how long each one is.
In follow-up work, understanding started to slip above about 250 words a minute.6 Some people can go well past that, and some can't.
In Glance, the pace test asks a question after every passage, so the speed you keep is one you can actually follow. For dense or difficult books, turn the dial down.
Classics that are out of copyright, ready to read. Or bring your own: Glance opens text files, EPUBs and PDFs right in your browser. Spines are as wide as the book is long, and times are at the speed on your dial.
Files are opened in your browser and kept there. There's no account, no upload and no tracking. Even the fonts are served from this site, so nothing about what you read goes anywhere else.
After your first visit the reader keeps working without a connection. Add it to your home screen and it opens like an app, ready on a train or a plane.