Yeah, the skimming thing surprised me too when I started looking into it. In regular reading, people skip about a quarter to a third of the words, mainly small ones like "the" and "of." Your eyes grab the next word or two out of the corner of your eye before you actually see them.

With RSVP, you save the eye movement, but you also lose the skipping. You have to look at every word, no matter if it’s important or not. Those two factors might balance each other out, which I think is a big reason the actual speed gain is much less than what most speed reading products promise.

The formatting issue you brought up is something I haven’t figured out. You miss line breaks, the shape of paragraphs, punctuation that sits in your peripheral vision, and even just keeping track of where you are on the page. I add longer pauses at punctuation to restore some of the sentence rhythm, but the structure of paragraphs and dialogue is still missing. That’s why it doesn’t work for me with fiction that has a lot of dialogue.