I think that speed reading is on a spectrum. I definitely read faster than the average person. My greatest speeds of reading are when I read novels for pleasure. Or articles on Medium (ha). However when learning information, especially information I’m unfamiliar with, I’ll definitely slow down and sometimes read the same thing multiple times. I think I still do this faster than average but it’s balanced out by note taking etc.

Unless someone has a true photographic memory (exceedingly rare) it’s not possible to read a page a second.

The complexity and unfamiliarity of words and phrases in literature (as opposed to popular fiction) also slow my reading speeds. It took me over a month to read Infinite Jest because of how insanely convoluted the book was. I would spend half an hour on a single page, trying to properly understand it.

So in my opinion speed reading is only achievable in moderation, and once you get to a certain speed you do start to lose information. I think you can read about 6x the speed of speech before comprehension breaks down. Blind people use sped up text-to-speech to navigate the Internet, my blind friend had hers set to about 5x normal speed, which she could understand but I could not. I think it’s because she’s used to it, and it’s the speed she would otherwise use to understand the written word.