A focus reader

A reader for wandering minds.

Kapka shows text one word at a time, at a pace that follows the sentence. Nothing to skim, nowhere to drift. And the whole page is back the moment you pause.

Start reading Free, and no account needed.

A twenty-second demo. Press play.

wpm

How it works

Built around the places where reading goes wrong.

A pace that follows the sentence

Flashing every word for the same instant is tiring, because sentences aren’t even. Kapka eases at a comma, rests at a full stop, and gives long or unusual words a little longer. The speed you set is still the speed you get, pauses included.

time on the word pause after it William James, 1890

Pause, and the page is back

The weakness of one-word readers is that you can’t glance back. Here you can: pause to see the full text with your place marked, then click any word to carry on from there.

Speed that listens

Turn on adaptive pace and the speed drifts up while you’re flowing, then eases off when you rewind. It only ever moves a little, around the speed you chose.

Bring your own reading

Paste an article, or drop in a file. It’s opened in your browser, and only the text is saved. Your library remembers your place in every one, and tells you how long is left at the speed you actually read.

Pasted text
PDF
EPUB
Markdown
HTML
Plain text

The honest part

What this won’t do.

Speed-reading apps have promised a lot over the years. This one would rather tell you what the research supports, and let you decide.

It won’t make you read 900 words a minute.: Nobody reads that fast and still understands. Comprehension starts to slip somewhere past 300, because the bottleneck is language, not eye movement. Kapka tells you when you’ve gone past the point where you’re only getting the gist.
It won’t train your attention.: Brain-training gains rarely carry over to anything else. What Kapka does is narrower and more useful: it holds the pace for you, so the text has your attention for as long as you’re reading it.
It won’t suit everyone.: If you tend to skim and lose the thread, a steady stream of single words can work better than a page. If you already read with focus, a page is hard to beat. Both are fine answers.

What’s next

Timing that understands the text.

Next up: pacing set by how surprising each word is in context, and short check-ins that tune your speed to what you’re taking in. Leave an email to hear when they land.