In July 2007, six-time World Speed Reading Champion Anne Jones read the final Harry Potter novel in 47 minutes flat, whizzing through 4,200 words per minute.

Most people read about 200 to 400 words per minute. The idea of improving that rate is tantalizing: Imagine zipping through a novel over lunch, or clearing your inbox in minutes.

Yet a new review of speed-reading tools and programs concludes that there is no quick fix for your to-be-read pile. Decades of research suggest that a person cannot dramatically increase his or her reading speed while still fully understanding the text.

“There’s a trade-off between speed and accuracy,’’ says study coauthor Elizabeth Schotter, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego. “You can read faster, but that means you’re not going to have as precise an understanding of the text.’’

She and colleagues spent two years combing through the scientific literature about how we read and how we might do so faster. Speed-reading courses, which first became popular in the 1960s, often claim to “unlock’’ people’s ability to take in more information in a single glance. Yet the amount of information a person can absorb at once is primarily limited by the brain, not the eyes, and is fairly resistant to alteration, the research team found.

Other programs attempt to constrain eye movement as a way to increase reading speed, for example by rapidly presenting words one at a time. Researchers, however, have found that eye movements account for no more than 10 percent of the time we spend reading, and eliminating the ability to reread words or sentences decreases overall comprehension.

“The hard part of reading is not seeing. The hard part of reading is making sense of language,’’ says Schotter.

However, if you’re not concerned with fully understanding a text, there are effective ways to skim and find information. The best “speed readers,’’ data suggests, are very good skimmers reading subject matter they are highly familiar with.

It is possible to modestly improve your reading speed, says Schotter. It just takes old-fashioned practice — reading more often to improve your vocabulary, so that words and phrases become more familiar and you don’t have to spend as much time processing them.

The review, published last month in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, was led by UCSD cognitive psychologist Keith Rayner, who spent more than four decades studying the process of reading. Rayner passed away last year, just after the first draft of the review was complete, following a battle with cancer.

MEGAN SCUDELLARI