Kindle Word Runner is gone — what to use instead

2026-09-04

If you are here, you probably opened your Kindle app one day and the Word Runner button was not there any more. It was quietly removed, and Amazon never replaced it. The searches that lead to this page — “kindle word runner alternative”, “kindle word runner going away” — are mostly people trying to get a habit back.

This page is written by the people who make one of the alternatives, so take the recommendation with that in mind. The rest of it is not a sales pitch: it is what the research says, including the parts that argue against us.

What Word Runner actually did

It showed one word at a time in a fixed position, so your eyes did not move across the line. The technique predates Kindle by decades and is called RSVP — rapid serial visual presentation. Removing eye movement is the whole idea: instead of your gaze jumping between words, the words come to your gaze.

Some implementations, including ours, also align each word at its optimal recognition point — roughly the spot slightly left of centre where a reader identifies a word fastest. That alignment is the difference between words flashing at you and words landing in the same place.

What it did not do

It did not make you read three times faster with the same understanding. The evidence is fairly consistent here:

• Comprehension holds up to roughly 350 words per minute. Between 400 and 450 it drops measurably.
• Above 500 words per minute, single-word presentation degrades comprehension for everyone — and more sharply if you are reading in a second language.
• The first thing you lose is not the facts, it is the inference. You can still say what happened; what fades is why.
• “No eye movement means no eye strain” is not established. One study of a similar reader found the opposite: comprehension fell and visual fatigue rose, apparently because people blink less when their eyes stop moving.

There is also a finding that cuts against the whole format: presenting more context at once — a moving highlight over normal text — measures better for comprehension than one word at a time. RSVP buys you focus, not understanding. If your problem is that your eyes slide off the page, that is exactly the right trade. If your problem is that dense material does not stick, it is the wrong one.

What to look for in a replacement

• A sane default speed. Anything that opens at 600 words per minute is selling a number, not a reading experience.
• Your own files. Word Runner only worked on Kindle books. A replacement that opens EPUB, PDF and TXT is not tied to one store.
• Punctuation pauses. Without a pause at sentence ends, sentences run together and comprehension drops for a reason that has nothing to do with speed.
• Where your files go. Some readers upload your book to convert it. Check before you feed it a book you care about.

What we built

Punctum is an RSVP reader for TXT, PDF and EPUB. It starts at 300 words per minute, uses a different default per language, warns you above 400, and keeps everything on your device — no account, no server, no upload. We wrote more about the trade-off in what RSVP reading actually does and whether speed reading hurts comprehension.

If you want the short version: it will not make you read three times faster. It will keep your eyes in one place, which for a lot of people is the thing that was missing.

References

• Lancashire, JSLTR — RSVP comprehension at 250/300/350 wpm versus 400/450.
• University of Nottingham — RSVP reading and non-native speakers.
• “Degradation of inferential reading comprehension at speed” (ResearchGate).
• ScienceDirect — “RSVP in reading: the case of Spritz” (comprehension and visual fatigue).
• Spritz patent application US 20130016867 (optimal recognition point alignment).