No one really knows when speed reading was first used, but it might have been a long while in the past. For hundreds of years, reading was the privilege of a minority of the most highly-educated people in the world, the overwhelming majority of whom were monks and priests. This small, select group of men protected their privilege and were loathe to coach the general populace to read. Furthermore, during those hundreds of years there were relatively few books to read compared with today. Books were also very costly as they all had to be copied out by hand. Possibly the only fact that has not altered is that the Bible was the most common book in existence and even now the Bible is the most prevalent book.