It is one of the first things people ask about a speed reading app: can I use it on the books I already bought on Kindle? Usually the answer is no, and it is worth knowing why before you go looking for a workaround.
Why Kindle books won’t open in other apps
Books bought from the Kindle store are protected with DRM (digital rights management). The file is locked to Amazon’s apps and devices, and other apps can’t read the text inside. Books bought in Apple Books work the same way: they open in Apple Books and nowhere else.
That is why a speed reading app, including ours, can’t import them. It isn’t a missing feature; the text simply isn’t available to any other app.
You will find tools online that strip DRM from ebooks. Removing it usually breaks the store’s terms, and in many countries it is against the law, so we don’t recommend it and our app doesn’t support it.
What you can speed read
Plenty of what people read is DRM-free:
- Public domain books. Libraries such as Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks offer thousands of classics as free, DRM-free EPUB files.
- DRM-free purchases. Some publishers, stores and authors sell ebooks without DRM. Look for “DRM-free” on the product page before you buy.
- Your own documents. Reports, papers, notes and drafts as PDF, DOCX or plain text.
- Articles. Long reads from the web, saved or shared from your browser.
How to speed read them on iPhone or iPad
Flincth Speed Reader, coming soon to iPhone and iPad, opens DRM-free EPUB, PDF (with a text layer), DOCX, TXT, RTF and Markdown files, web articles and pasted text. It shows them one word, phrase or short sentence at a time at the pace you set, keeps your place, and lets you pause to see the surrounding text.
A scanned PDF, which is a picture of a page rather than text, can’t be read; the app tells you so rather than showing an empty screen.
And for your Kindle library?
Read it in Amazon’s own apps, which can show your reading speed and how much is left. Amazon has offered a one-word-at-a-time mode on some devices in the past; check your Kindle app’s reading settings to see whether yours has it. For everything else, a DRM-free copy and a speed reading app work together without any workarounds.
If you are wondering whether speed reading works at all, we wrote up what the research says.