The Art of Manliness (yes, I follow a man-centered blog. Whatcha gunna do, it has some great skill based articles and cool insights on life!) had an excellent article on speed reading a while back (2009, to be imprecise... I'm honestly not even sure how I stumbled across this!). In it, they discuss Spreeder, a free website that will help improve your top reading speed.
It's fun to improve your score, too - in the morning, when I have some free time, I go to Wikipedia and either click "random article" (it can take a while to find an interesting one sometimes) or "recent events" and copy and paste an article into Spreeder. I'm learning a lot about random stuff, like the recently Independent State of Azawad.
So why do this? If you're a writer, programmer, or anyone else who's self employed, you'll be doing a lot of self driven research and skill acquisition. If you're working on a science fiction story and can plow through a paper on astrosociology in five minutes, that is incredibly useful. If you're editing a news piece and suddenly run across something you aren't sure about, having the ability to break out your Chicago Manual of Style and refresh yourself on the rule in a minute flat, that's useful, too.
Another place where speed reading comes in handy: investing. I'm no expert, so I won't talk a lot about this, but I will say that wise, hands-on investing depends a lot on knowing what's going on in the world. Speed read the news and the Wall Street Journal!
In closing, there are plenty of things to take slowly. I wouldn't speed read The Brothers Karamazov, for example. But for research, staying informed about the world, even your daily blogreads, speedy reading is a great way to increase your productivity and your range of skills.
P.S. Know when to use it, though. For example, I edit news stories. And it definitely makes people nervous when I am done in two minutes. While I know I can increase productivity by editing more articles in less time, my client's peace of mind is ultimately more important.
How fast do you read? Have you found that it's useful to be able to read fast? Are you going to try using Spreeder?
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