I tried this when I first learned photoreading years ago, nad it did not work for me. The books I used were almost entirely pictures. As far as using it on books on strategy, mindset, training, and awareness, which are mostly text, I see no reason why it wouldn't work. Books by Mark MacYoung, for example, would be good for learning self defense awareness. Of course, different people pick up different skills more easily than others, so play with it and see how well you do.
What has worked for me is modeling. Using the New Behavior Generator (the NLP technique, though the Paraliminal should also work) it is easy to learn individual techniques. Another modeling technique, Deep Trance Identification (I got the process from Training Trances) is also useful. A friend of mine wanted me to help with a demo, but he wanted to demonstrate techniques from a ryu I have not studied. I watched the video in the accelerated learning state and then went into trance and used DTI. My performance was great and people were coming up to me saying it was "awesome." Techniques just seemed to come to me, even though they were not my normal techniques. A few months later I saw the video again and those techniques were from the video. I don't usually have results like this though.
I also led two students I was training through DTI and they both improved greatly, one even was able to fight multiple opponenets when before he had problems with one opponent.
Attitude makes a big difference in your performance. Once I decided to use Instantaneous Personal Magnetism to model the attitude of my instructor. My skills vastly improved for a week or so, the time frame I gave my unconscious to adopt the attitudes. IMO I already had those skills at that level, but adopting his attitude kind of took away inhibitions I had on performing at that level. Now, he was kind of a jerk and I acted a bit like a jerk during that time I was trying on his attitude, which I why I gave my mind a time limit and lowered the intensity level to 1/10th. This was just an experiment to see how taking on another's attitude would work. When really doing it for any long term skill you may want filter out any "bad stuff."
