I'm with you on the skepticism thing. When we read, at least when we read anything important, we aren't simply ingesting bits of information. We're usually reading something that was carefully crafted to have a logical flow, where what is presented early supports or leads to what is said later. To understand the structure of a written piece is not easy. For "dense" works (e.g., some philosophy) it might take reading and re-reading several times, jumping forward and backward, to fully figure out what is being said, whether it makes sense, whether it's to be taken as reliable or not. Even that might not be enough. The idea of speedreading for the "main points" is ridiculous. Even less dense works have a logical flow, they aren't just a list of bits of information. If you're going to read critically (i.e, with good comprehension), which is generally the proper way to read, speedreading is useless.