This brief, attractively designed book is a master's thesis. It reads like a master's thesis. It is very, very important that readers, information science professionals, and policy-makers read this cogent, well-argued tract on the role of reading and the varying styles that reading follows.John Miedema writes with concision and care of the subject at hand, the absorptive reading of text. He doesn't denigrate the role of any type of reading...he explicitly states that scanning, skimming, skipping all have roles in the reader's tool-box...but he is bucking a trend in his inclusiveness. He presents us with a good overview of the current research on and thinking about reading in a digital age. He notes that many information professionals take an all-or-nothing view of the practice of reading: A slow reader must be a defective reader, and in need of intervention and help.Miedema says that slow reading, deep reading, whatever label one applies to the immersive and absorptive act of book consumption, is appropriate for some types of texts in some siituations, not all texts in all situations. His point is borne out in research done in the past 20 years, as the digital information revolution has occurred; one reads, and it IS reading, snippets and chunks of text on the Internet or in electronic formats; full-on absorptive reading is still more often done in physical print by most people. Miedema gives full and deserved marks to digital media for their vast superiority in enabling and delivering research and citation to the academic or student. Most of us fit the student category at least some of the time, and so we tend to use the Internet and other electronic sources to fulfil those functions because they are so fast, so easy, and so pervasive. However, learning-reading is still done with a tree-book in hand not an e-book on a desktop.The brevity of this text, only some 65pp, doesn't admit of depth in presentation of the discovered facts. The author himself proposes, within his text, two books that I would like to see published, and will purchase as soon as they are available: "The Librarian's Guide to Getting Lost", a text intended to guide the cicerones behind the check-out rostrum in overcoming the urge to offer perplexed readers more of the same thing they already read; and "100-Mile Stories: A Year of Reading Locally", a book that argues for the creation, maintenance, and consumption of stories written within and about the near vicinity of your home. This plays off the bible of the Slow Food movement, "The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating", in both title and inspiration.I recommend this book highly to the reader whose search for story goes beyond the need to distract one's self, to the seeker after answers to the eternal "why?" of life, and to anyone even remotely connected with, or planning to join, the universe of library-science practicioners. Don't even pick it up if you have a low tolerance for academic style. The citations alone would make you homicidal.
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