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I think it's worthwhile to distinguish between reading faster and speed reading. Speed reading usually involves techniques that borrow from skimming and is meant to sacrifice a bit of quality for quantity. There are times when that's useful but it's not something I would do for pleasure.
I took a course in speed reading in college, lo those many years ago, and it helped me. I was and still am a fairly slow reader. Most of the time my emphasis was on comprehension and I didn't use the speed reading techniques I learned. At times though, they were pretty useful. I could jump my speed from my usual 300 wpm to well over 1000 wpm and still retain a lot of what I read. But it wasn't much fun and I did retain less than when reading normally.
After college I kind of forgot about speed reading and I haven't done it much since.
Reading faster is a very different thing. I've found that by increasing the margins I read maybe 25% faster. I haven't actually measured that and I'm not sure how to measure it but that's how much faster it seems to me. It hasn't affected my comprehension at all, at least not that I can tell. In fact I sometimes think it might have increased it. It has increased my pleasure in reading. I read a bit faster and I read more now.
Barry
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