Readlax

While reading is certainly an enjoyable hobby, many of us don’t have a lot of free time at our disposal, so being able to read quickly is an invaluable skill. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools that can help you get better at this.

Readlax is one of them, a relatively simple Chrome extension that can help you increase your reading speed by setting a constant pace that needs to be followed, thus ensuring that you are concentrating on the text and nothing else.

This is a great extension for users who often buy and read books on Google Books, Scribd, Smashwords or Wattpad, as it offers full integration with these websites and will be enabled automatically whenever you open a book.

Moreover, the Readlax Chrome toolbar menu provides convenient shortcuts to all of these websites, making much easier to access them when you feel like reading something.

Once you have opened a book in your browser, the Readlax toolbar will be displayed at the bottom of the window. You can start or stop reading with the click of a button, as well as modify the reading speed on the fly; it can go anywhere from a leisurely 50 words per minute to a pretty much inhuman 3000 WPM.

The extension will highlight one sentence at a time, letting you focus on something specific to avoid getting distracted. However, it would have been great if more options for customization were available, as you cannot change anything about the way the text is highlighted.

In the end, Readlax is a well-designed add-on that just needs a few more customization options. It works with several popular online book libraries, offering seamless integration, and it can help you read a lot faster with a little practice.