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Incremental reading is another amazing innovation of Supermemo. I haven't seen or heard about such an idea anywhere else! Unfortunately, only the Windows version supports incremental reading. So that's a drawback of the Palm Pilot version; but read on anyway, Palm Users!
Here's the idea of incremental reading: you read a little at a time. Amazing, right? Well, hold on. What happens when you read a little bit of an article, and then put it aside? Answer: you forget the bit you read, and when you finally come back to it you have to start over. Supermemo not only solves this problem, but it helps you digest the article all the way down to flashcards. Here's what you do:
First, you import your article, web page, or whatever into Supermemo. Supermemo can treat it either as a ``flash-card'' or as a ``task'' in your task list. We'll ignore the ``task-list'' option, because it's pretty obvious how to use that feature. So now your whole document is a ``flash-card'' inside Supermemo.
When Supermemo shows you the document as a ``flash-card'', you go ahead and read some of it. You don't have to read the whole thing in one sitting; if you aren't finished, Supermemo will show it to you again in a while. That way, you don't forget to come back to it!
While you read, you can ``mark up'' the document. When a section isn't important to you, you can mark it ``Ignored'', and Supermemo shows it as crossed-off text in a light font. When you come back to the document, you'll know not to waste your time reading that section again.
When you find sections which are important to you, you can mark the section ``Remembered''. Supermemo takes that section and highlights it. It also makes that section into a ``flash-card'' of its own! So now you will periodically see the whole article, but you will also periodically see the section you marked as important. You can edit that ``flash-card'' to make it stand by itself: for example you can change ``he'' into a person's name.
When you've reached the bottom of the article, you can ``Forget'' the article. Now you're done with it, and you won't see it again. But you'll still see the important sections you've ``Remembered'' periodically, so you don't forget them.
Of course, you can ``Remember'' pieces of those important sections, and can even ``Forget'' the section once you've taken out the pieces you want. As you can see, you are gradually digesting the article into smaller and smaller pieces.
Finally, when those pieces have become truly bite-size, you can convert them to real flash-cards. With a single click you can create ``fill in the blank'' type flash-cards, or you can create a normal question-and-answer flash card. When the nugget of information is converted to a flash card, you can ``Forget'' that piece of text: you've digested it all the way down into facts that you won't be forgetting!
I use the incremental reading feature for reading long, complicated documents, and it's world's better than any other method I've tried. (And with a PhD in Mathematics, I've certainly studied my share of documents!) It forces you to read the important bits very carefully--but still saves you time by helping you to ignore the less important bits. I can't recommend it highly enough. In fact, I'd give my left arm to get a Palm application which supports incremental reading!
