Hmm, the link to the lifehacker article seems to be not correct? I was just kinda curious on who they were quoting and whether I knew them or not
. Professional curiosity, since for a number of years I worked for a couple of faculty that did this type of research (I actually wrote the software we used to do this research for our lab). The numbers quoted above definitely sound about right.
Now, the weird thing is, I don't completely discount speed reading. I took a class for it way back in junior high, and while I started on the high end of the people in that class, I did find I was able to significantly increase the speed of my reading while still retaining very high comprehension rates. However, not everybody is really cut out for it, there were definitely people in our class that made no progress at all. That said, in general, since about all the reading I do these days is for pleasure, I probably don't read anywhere near what I used to be able to do, because I don't see the point in it when reading for pleasure.
I'm not quite as in touch with the research in the area that I used to, but I'm not sure anyone was really doing any real eyetracking research on anything of much more than single page type things, and for real speed reading type research I'd really like to see that done over things that are more than a few pages of reading to get a good feel for speed vs comprehension. Part of the reason for the lack of that is quite frankly, the eyetracking setup isn't really conducive for longer stints of reading, and ergonomics of the situation would likely throw people off a little (I know *I* wouldn't have wanted to sit there reading multiple page type things even with the later generations of eyetracking devices we used, and believe me, I've spent a sizeable chunk of my life hooked up to eye trackers).