Read the Books You Already Own, Faster

Most "read books faster" apps are actually subscriptions to someone else's library — a catalogue of summaries or licensed titles that never quite includes the book on your nightstand. If your problem is the stack you already own and don't finish, a catalogue is solving the wrong problem.

The actual problem with the stack

You buy books faster than you finish them — nearly everyone who reads seriously does. And the failure mode is rarely "reading too slowly" in the mechanical sense. It's losing the thread: attention slides off the page, you re-read the same paragraph three times, the session dies, the bookmark never moves again. A tool that helps has to attack that, not promise an implausible words-per-minute number.

Velo's approach is two reading modes over one synced position:

• RSVP mode streams the text one word at a time at a fixed focus point, at a pace you set between 50 and 1,000 WPM. Its real power isn't speed — it's that your attention has nowhere else to go. The word is either being read or it's gone.
• Reader mode is a proper typeset page — for the passages that need your eyes to roam, and for the pleasure of reading normally when focus isn't the problem.
• Scrub drags you back through the stream with momentum when you half-caught something.

Because both modes share a single position, you can stream through the chapters that drag and page-read the ones you love, switching mid-sentence. That's what turns a focus gimmick into a way to actually finish books — and the honest science behind the technique is in what is RSVP reading?

What "your own books" means in practice

Velo reads DRM-free EPUB and PDF, plus TXT and Markdown — imported from Files, Safari, or Mail via the Share Sheet. PDFs are restructured on-device into real books: chapters detected, running headers stripped, footnotes linked. Web articles come in cleaned of ads. Everything is stored on your device and reads fully offline.

The one boundary worth stating plainly: books bought from Kindle or Apple Books are DRM-locked to those stores, and no third-party app can open them — including Velo. That's less limiting than it sounds; most of what actually slows people down is reports, papers, and DRM-free purchases, and there's a large world of legitimately DRM-free books. Our guide to where to find DRM-free ebooks maps it.

What it costs

Both reading modes are free, with import for up to 3 books, reading stats, and an included library of public-domain classics — enough to take one book from your stack all the way to finished before paying anything. Pro ($69.99/year or $8.99/month, 7-day trial) removes the cap and syncs your library and position across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

No catalogue to subscribe to, no licensed library to run out of, no summaries standing in for the actual book. Just the stack you already own, and a fair shot at getting through it.

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