John Miedema

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 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 …

Dan Bloom, a reporter in Taiwan, read The Art of Slow Reading article in The Guardian today. He sent me these two YouTube videos he created. The first is his whimsical musical obit for newspapers: “I just can’t live without my daily snailpaper.” The second describes his strategy for staying unplugged, and makes his case for reading on paper rather than reading on screens. He calls the latter “screening” and calls for studies to compare brain responses while using both methods. The term might catch. Thanks Dan.

I recently spoke with Patrick Kingsley of The Guardian about Slow Reading. His article, The Art of Slow Reading, is online today. Kingsley surveys the new and old sources that make up the emerging slow reading movement. He points to analysis by Jakob Nielsen: “many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion”. Nicholas Carr argues that “our online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information.” I was pleased to see the connection with Lancelot R …

How much thought do you put into selecting a setting for reading? Recently I have been thinking about the extended mind thesis. It states that our minds do not end with our brains but extend into the environment. A thought is partly a product of the setting. It makes sense then that where we reading makes a big difference in a reading experience.
Maybe you already do this. Many people read cookbooks in the kitchen, magazines in the bathroom, computer books while programming, or a bible or psalter in a …

Like many of us, Malcolm Jones missed the annual International Day of Slowness on June 21. Most of us were in too much of a hurry to notice. He’s putting his foot down about being rushed, and his line starts right next to mine with slow reading. In the July 12 print edition of Newsweek, Jones has written an article, Slow Notion, that reviews the rising Slow Reading movement. He cites from his interview with me about my book, Slow Reading. He also talked with Tracey Seeley, a University of …

I was recently interviewed by Noah Garrett, editor for STEM News, a newsletter about education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). We discussed the value of slow reading in STEM education. In my day job in the technology sector, I regularly use the web to find code snippets; web search engines are perfectly engineered to find them. I also use e-books to get a quick orientation to a new technology, but when I want a deep understanding of a new technology, I prefer a print book I can read …

Maria Zuppello of Italy’s Europa newspaper, interviewed me recently about Slow Reading. I appreciated her questions about the international and democratic dimensions of slow reading. Of course, Italians know all about the larger Slow movement, having founded the original Slow Food movement. Her article is available online. For those of you like me who don’t know Italian, a modest translation is available through Google’s translation service. The connection I made with OpenBook doesn’t come across too well in the translation. My point there was that technology and slow reading can …

I did not know that Monday was the International Day of Slowness. Perhaps that explains the recent spike of interest in slow reading. Malcolm Jones picks up on the Associated Press story with a related article in Newsweek. Another article by Richard James makes a connection with Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows, which explains how our fast internet reading habits interfere with the formation of long-term memories.
James, Richard (June 20, 2010). Unaccelerated Reading. Deleware Division of Libraries.
Jones, Malcolm (June 23, 2010). Slow Reading: An Antidote for a Fast …

Holly Ramer, Associated Press, interviewed me yesterday about slow reading. She was doing on story on Thomas Newkirk, a New Hampshire professor who is encouraging schools to use traditional reading techniques like reading aloud and memorization. In her research she came across my book, Slow Reading, The first chapter in my book talks about slow reading techniques being used in the classroom. Ramer also interviewed Mary Ellen Webb, a third-grade teacher, and Patti Flynn, an assistant principal. We share a conviction about the value of slow reading for students of …

Diane Mizrachi (UCLA) has published a scholarly review of Slow Reading in InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies. She commends the breadth of the literature review, while critiquing the brevity of the treatment. I appreciate the ongoing interest. The observation about brevity by Mizrachi and others is fair. Is it worth writing a second, expanded edition at some point? I do not lack for additional material and ideas.

Caralyn Champa wrote a thoughtful book review of Slow Reading for Libreas: Library Ideas, an open access journal from the Berlin School of Library and Information Science. Love the photo.

I was interviewed by Dave Bonta of Via Negativa on Slow Reading. The interview is part of Dave’s Woodrat series of podcasts, “a weekly virtual campfire for the sharing of poems, stories, and B.S.” and my ramblings fit right in.
Dave is the author of Via Negativa, a literary blog with poetry, photos, essays, and brilliant outdoor videos that are also poetry. He is editor of qarrtsiluni, an online literary magazine. He recently published Odes to Tools, a book of poetry about traditional tools I have just finished reading. There …

Litwin Books has made Slow Reading available as an ebook through ebrary. If your library is not currently a subscriber, you can preview it or ask for a trial subscription to view the whole book.
In Slow Reading, I stated that “ebooks are metadata for print books”. Given the industry’s hopes for ebooks this view might seem discouraging. Not at all. My view is that most computers are better for information discovery than for long-form (slow) reading. The web is a perfectly acceptable interface for reading the short snippets required to …