John Miedema

Clay Shirky has a new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. In this book he makes an argument with which I agree. Much of the cognitive surplus we squandered on watching television has been put to better use on the web. I also agree that the potential is enormous. As Shirky observes, Wikipedia was built out of one percent of the hours spent watching television in a year. However, before the web, we also spent more time reading long-form books, shaping the capacity for complex cognition, …

Feed readers are old news for many active web users. Using a feed reader like Bloglines or Google Reader, a reader enjoys having the latest information from preferred sites all show up in one tool. I noticed that any site that did not have an RSS feed quickly fell off my radar. I asked, Does a site without RSS exist? Although many people still read the web the old-fashioned way of visiting bookmarked sites, I wondered if the new trend would cause non-RSS sites to fall off the map into …

OpenBook 3 is not far from completion: a few more small features to add, loose ends to tie up, and testing. Most recently I updated OpenBook to use Open Library’s server-side implementation of their Books API. This may sound dull but it will make a big difference for OpenBook in two ways.
Loads triple fast. Previously, OpenBook had to make two to three API calls to get all the book information it needed. The deprecated APIs needed separate calls for book and author information. If you supplied an ISBN, OpenBook …

I missed this positive review of Slow Reading in the September 2009 newsletter of the Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association. It was reviewed by Jenny Bossaller, PhD, Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science, University of Southern Mississippi.
The title of the book might suggest a boring slog, but I found Slow Reading to be a quick, easy, and fun read. In it, John Miedema weaves his own reading and experiences through a thoughtful look at past and current trends in publishing and technology, couching personal …

I recently asked, “Where do you read?” The American Antiquarian Society has a wonderful online curated exhibition, A Place of Reading. Index (click the ‘Enter’ line). Introduction.
In highlighting the locations where individuals performed the act of reading in America, through the use of images and objects from the AAS collections, we hope to tell a story. It is not a definitive story by any means, but a story of three centuries’ worth of individuals ‘caught’ in the act of reading in homes, taverns, libraries, military camps, parlors, kitchens, and …

I was recently interviewed about Slow Reading by Gregory Lamb of The Christian Science Monitor. His cover story is online today. The print issue is dated today, July 26, 2010. Lamb jumps into a hot topic, “Are iPads, smartphones, and the Mobile Web rewiring the way we think?” Carr’s book, The Shallows figures centrally in the story. “I think it’s subtler than, ‘Is [the Internet] making us smarter or making us stupid?’ ” says Nicholas Carr. “It’s how it’s making us smarter or how it’s making us stupider that’s interesting.” …

Jeremy Dibbell is a Boston bibliophile, haunter of used bookstores, and reference librarian. His review of Slow Reading provides a nice summary of the chapters and some thoughts:
Perhaps more controversially, Miedema suggests that digital books have not evolved into anything other than a sort of metadata for print books (that they exist “only for evaluative purposes before the reader seeks out the physical copy”) (p. 37). I think it’s too early to say that this is the case; while the statistics aren’t in yet, it seems likely that many adopters …

The debate over technology and books has reached new heights this year. Amazon just announced that e-books have overtaken hardback sales. At the same time, there has been an intensification of debate about the effects of online reading on our brains. At the center of this debate is Nicholas Carr’s, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
Do your kids still do memory work at school? Have you wondered if memorization matters much now that we can access information online anytime? Carr clearly shows that it does. …

A conservative defines a liberal as someone who sees a drowning man and throws him a rope only half as long as needed, calling out, “I’ve done my part, now you do yours.” Compromise. Mushy oatmeal. That is how people with polarized ideas, from either end of any spectrum, portray the people who prefer a middle ground. Sitting on the fence, they call it. Ever run into a fence? It is cataclysmic, a sudden dramatic disruption in pattern. No oatmeal.
Many middle zones are cataclysmic, marking a dramatic change that …

Surfing the web, pages loading, files downloading or uploading, even offline using resource hungry programs, how much time do you spend watching your computer’s hourglass spin, waiting? Unlike a book that everyone can read at once, the Internet is a stateless resource, requiring time and energy each time a request is made. If everyone requested a single page at once, the server would crash. So requests are queued, and we wait.
Sure, we have to wait with print resources too. If I am writing and need to look something up, …