As the Chief Innovation Officer of Chicago-based Publicis Group Media, Rishad is one of the most influential thinkers in the North American advertising industry. It is therefore no surprise that the audience was on the edge of their seats listening intently to Rishad`s advice.

We at Spreed found his talk very interesting considering many of his recommendations push newspapers in the direction of a number of the products and services that we provide (mobile platforms, mobile advertising, location based advertising, etc).

Rishad left with 10 recommendations for newspapers to follow in the future that we would like to share here:

1. Be schizophrenic – Only the schizophrenic will thrive. Run two or more business models at the same time but make sure they are very separate. Do not make a big mesh of all your models.
2. Embrace technology – Tech is the new magic. Make sure the follwing ive things are done by the end of this week.
   1. Use an RSS reader and start following your passions through it
   2. Get a Twitter account
   3. Get on Facebook
   4. Get on Foursquare
   5. Go to someone in your company who is younger (probably 2-3 levels below you) and make them your mentor. Take them outside of the company every two weeks and get them to teach you about what is new and upcoming
3. Embrace the blur – Church and state are too separate within news organizations. All elements of a news organization (sales, editorial, technology) need to work together in the same group.
4. Learn fast, iterate faster, make mistakes and don’t be afraid to fail.
5. Do a massive outreach to young people – You want to make the industry exciting. Don`t be swamped with old people. Get youngsters into the industry.
6. Think about what curating, combining and editing really is
7. Platforms – Every company needs a platform strategy. How do you attract new partners? What’s your device strategy (iPad, iPhone, etc)? What’s your search strategy?
8. Make sure that you celebrate the software and technology folks at your organization. Don’t hide them in a room somewhere even if they are strange. Tell them about the business and ask them to solve business issues
9. Think about  the future of your organization. Thank about your organizational design, incentives, benefits, etc.
10. This one was a bit odd and I am not sure exactly what he meant by it, but the industry is not anyone but you. there is not industry but yo, embrace the “muchness”. “This is my dream and I am going to decide how it ends”

Check out even more pics and videos at Gizmodo here

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So the iPad was just officially announced by Steve Jobs and overall sentiment online has been mixed. I am going to reserve my judgement until I have actually placed my eyes and hands on the device myself. However, I do want to point out that this device or one similar to it is going to completely revolutionize the PC industry.

A few posts back I talked about the impending mobile OS wars and the future of the PC industry. The launch of the iPad proves that this movement is very real and that we are going to see more of these in the near future.

What does this all mean for newspapers and media companies? Well, we saw two media demo’s today. The first was from MLB who always do a spectacular job with their interactive technology innovations. If anyone is on the cusp of making ipTV attractive for the masses it is the MLB. more importantly though was the demo from the New York Times.

Here at Spreed we are very focused on the newspaper industry and as such the iPad is a very interesting platform  for us. The NYTimes demo showed off a great looking app that really took advantage of the entire form factor to replicate and enhance the traditional newspaper experience. I love how they have integrated videos and galleries seamlessly into articles and how users can get a snapshot of every article in todays newspaper through one view.

In addition this is a much smarter platform for newspapers and magazine publishers in comparison to the Kindle. For a good year now I have been saying that the Kindle is okay, but it doesn’t satisfy the needs of readers and advertisers. The Kindle is black and white and not interactive from a media stand point. The iPad completely satisfies these holes left by the Kindle. It can do everything a Kindle can, but displays everything in color and lets people really interact with the content (a must for online advertisers these days).

Mobile platforms are exciting and there is loads of potential for innovation. Spreed is definitely going to be playing around with the iPad and helping our clients embrace this new platform. However, we suggest everyone be cautious and make sure that they understand each platform before they move onto the next one. Make sure you can sell at least some of your existing mobile inventory on your iPhone, Blackberry and Android apps before you start sinking big money into an iTab edition of your paper.

I look forward to getting my iTab and sharing my first hand findings with  you all. Please feel free to call or email me with any questions about this new platform and what it means for your organization.

Last week Mobile Marketing Watch posted an interesting article summarizing some stats from a recent DM2PR and Quattro study. I’ll let you read the article for yourselves, but the general premise is that very few people tested out mobile apps in 2009. However, those that did saw great results and as such many more marketers are planning on embracing an app strategy with the iPhone being the platform of choice.

Development and Overall Use of Apps to Skyrocket in 2010

The study indicated that many marketers took a “wait and see” approach in 2009 in terms of a mobile app strategy, stating fewer than one-half of marketers created either a mobile or social app in 2009.  Most of those surveyed plan to invest in a mobile app this year, however, with the iPhonebeing the platform of choice, followed by Android.

For example, some of our most notable successes were:

The launch of The Globe and Mail, Metro News Canada (1st Bilingual mobile app featured by Apple), Sing Tao News (largest Asian market newspaper in Canada), Guardian Media, Scripps’ GoVols mobile sports app for the University of Texas and more.

This resulted in:

• Cumulatively spawning millions of page views per month per app while driving new mobile media brand and revenue opportunities for each.
• Some mobile apps now are attracting more page views per month than on their branded Internet websites; with loyalty to the brands and mobile apps extremely high on a daily basis.
• Some partners seeing more than 2% CTR’ s on ad campaigns ran and sold by their in-house sales teams; as well as upwards of $15 average CPMs for mobile ad sales — much higher than industry norms for these premium media properties.

With proven successes like these in the market, along with our proprietary service delivery innovations for mobile analytics and advertising at Spreed, it is with complete confidence that we believe that our partners will significantly increase pageviews and revenue streams from their mobile media properties in 2010.

We are going to make a major push in 2010 to share our industry findings with everyone. Please keep coming back and do not hesitate to contact me at dave[at]spreedinc[dot]com if you have any questions about building or monetizing mobile apps.

Since our last post we quietly launched the Globe and Mail’s iPhone application. I call this a quiet launch as the app currently does not include all the features we plan on rolling out to the mass public. We used a strong early adopter community on Twitter to test out the base application. This was done to ensure our core focus on creating a strong, best of breed, content application was satisfied. Since the initial launch we have garnered lots of fantastic user feedback both through the hashtag #globeapp on twitter and through our uservoice page. This feedback has led to a second release that includes offline reading as well as haptic feedback and has also paved the way for many more future product developments.

Thanks to our core group of early adopters, it is safe to say that the soft-launch of the Globe and Mail application was a huge success. The usage numbers are through the roof and we have already been featured on one of Canada’s most prominent technology blogs, Techvibes. Warren Frey, who contributes to Techvibes on the topic of game changing business models states that:

As an ardent news junkie, one thing I immediately noticed about the app is that it’s rock solid. Unlike the New York Times iphone app, Spreed’s app is robust and never freezes up and crashes …

It’s  not what’s under the hood that’s interesting about Spreed, though they’ve certainly done a good job of crafting a solid mobile news app. It’s their adaptation of print media to a new form in a smart way that’s most impressive.

We appreciate Warren’s understanding and excitement for our new business model and are very proud that he believes that our goal of creating a reliable and user friendly way of diseminating the news on mobile phones has been achieved.

I would like to thank Warren and all the members of our fantastic early adopter community. Without all of you this application would not have been such a great success and we look forward to working with everyone in the near future to help build a best of breed mobile newspaper platform.

Just a little personal background: I am a young guy and have been a techie my entire life; pretty much ever since I can remember, so going to the “tech mecca” was big for me. San Fran didn’t let me down. It was everything I thought it would be and more. 

During the Summit we had the chance to attend seminars ranging in topics life environmental sustainability, econonmic responsibility, emerging technologies and most importantly, to us, the mobile revolution.

People have been talking about mobile for a long time and we have always known it was going to be big. It’s been touted as THE platform. A way for advertisers to connect with users in a far more intelligent way. The problem was that the technology and interest of the people just wasn’t there.

The Web 2.0 Summit presenters and attendees, however, seemed to suggest that the technology (i.e. 3G, the iPhone, the Bold) is now where it needs to be and that the market is ready to adopt it. 3G networks are rolling out all over North America and the iPhone and Bold is becoming a common staple of ever day society. We realized it was time to commit to the mobile revolution.

I had the opportunity to chat with mobile expert, Raven Zachary, who made me realize the opportunity in providing mobile services to businesses.

As a team we decided it was time to truly define our business model and It is no surprise, given the excitement at the conference, that we chose to focus our model on mobile – and the iPhone in particular. 

We left San Fran more inspired than ever.

As of today Spreed will be focusing on providing fully branded mobile applications for content providers. We will use our expertise in mobile reading technology to provide publishers with the best of breed mobile solutions.

But we wont just stop at reading technologies. We want to replicate the newspaper experience on a mobile device. We want to eliminate the need for paper based news. More importantly, we want to find ways for newspapers and other content providers to engage their readers and build revenue they never thought possible. 

That being said we will unfortunately have less time to focus on projects like Spreed:News. We appreciate all the feedback we’ve received so far and will continue to fund our R&D lab and develop new reading technologies. We apologize in advance if we do not respond to your feedback as fast as we have in the past.But at this current time, our prime focus will be on pushing content to mobile devices with a clear eye to helping the publishers monetize that content. Such is the reality of 2009 – and from a technology point of view, the timing couldn’t be better. improve the system. 

This is a very exciting time for Spreed and we appreciate all the support we’ve received and continue to receive. I look forward to connecting with everyone in the near future. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me if you have any questions about Spreed’s model or Spreed:News. I am always available via twitter @ http://www.twitter.com/spreed or less frequently via our facebook fan page @ http://www.facebook.com/pages/Spreed/51827975076

I look forward to hearing from you all

Best regards

Dave Coleman (@DaveColeman)

Dan talks about how Make and Craft magazines were among the first available on the iPhone editions via Texterity which is an iPhone based Magazine distribution service. Dan states that, “We like trying different things. About 80 percent of our total circulation signups come through all the online marketing that we do.”

With print publications fighting to stay relevant amongst a mass of declining circulation numbers, it is fantastic to see someone actually increasing circulation by embracing the digital world. Read the full interview below:

Dan Wood, Associate Publisher, O’Reilly Media: Magazine Publishers Association, Digital Driver Edition

Q. Looking ahead, what would you say are your top priorities?

A. Our next big thing is how to get our events localized and bring our brands to local communities in, say, Seattle oith that already. Online traffic is strong for our store, Maker Shed where we sell kits and projects. Traffic really builds there in the November-December holiday season. For the last three months, traffic has been up an average of 45 percent versus the previous year. A few weeks ago, the store moved to its own dedicated server to handle more traffic.r Austin.  And our ability to integrate e-commerce and retail with magazines. We’ve had enormous success w

Update

Larry Brilliant is up from Google.org which is the philanthropic arm of Google. He is letting us know why he chose to join up with Google. But first he wants us to understand the whole concept of a philanthropic arm inside an organization like Google. How does it work? Google.org is a hybrid philathropy organization. The Google founders take some of the money from shareholders and put it in an organization that will try to tackle the biggest problems in the world. It wont benefit the shareholders directly, which is a big move away from how public companies are currently run. 

Google.org isnt the only philanthropic organization in Google, they also do Google Grants.

The process for deciding what to fund is the typical VC model. They look for two criteria: is the problem huge and can the solution scale (or Google had nothing to offer it). In terms of not being able or to scale or google has nothing to offer, one of the largest concepts to combat infant and child mortality is early female education, but they will not fund education as Google has nothing to offer.

Improving government services and allowing communities to communicate both with each other and with the government is an example of something they have worked on. In the US, before you move you want to look at the schools in the area that you are looking for. There is nothing like that in areas like India and Africa. So Google is helping private companies do this. Great example of using the power of information to help empower people in the most under-developed areas of the Globe.

There are many strengths in the hybrid model that Google has created. Google is not going to use its philanthropic arm to develop emerging markets. This does not mean philanthropy cannot help your company. Great engineers will gravitate to companies that are making the world a better place. It is okay to make investments in for profit, commercial companies. Google.org’s hyrbid structure lets them do that.

Another major effort they are working towards is reducing the price of renewable energy. Right now coal is the cheapest form of energy. However, if Google.org invests in companies that are working on renewable energy they can reduce the cost of these forms of energy. They have invested in wind, geo-thermal, etc and by driving the cost of these types of energy down they can be more effective than barking up each individual governments tree as they are making it obvious to switch to these forms of energy as they will be cheaper than coal.

It’s okay for these renewable energy companies to make money and therefore okay for Google.org to invest in them because if they did not make money then nobody else would do it and the technology would not spread. 

“It’s core to google to curb coal and oil use” This is because Google doesn’t want to be part of the problem, they want to be part of the solution. 50% of their energy use is coal based and they want to change this. This has caused an obsession within the company. 

Update

Larry Brilliant is off now and Mary Meeker is up on stage from Morgan Stanley, talking about emerging technological trends and the economy

Mary is talking about home ownership and the reasons for the increase and recent problems (same old, same old, wont go into too much detail on this one, just general economic stats to date … very depressing, everything is down).

Importantly however are her closing points:

-Companies with cogent business models that provide consumer value should survive / thrive

-Lots of ad share to gain compared with some of the other platforms

-Search will continue to become important 

-Ads follow eyeballs, it just takes time

Update

Mary is off stage now and Rajesh Jain from Netcore solutions is heading up to stage now

He is going to talk about emerging enterprises, technologies and markets: Made in India, but made for the world. He is going to talk about two companies the first being Novatium:

-50 mil middle income homes and only 8 million home pc’s

-5 million broadband connections and 30 million cybercafe visitors. He believes this has to change!

Novatium created a thin computer than is simple and affordable (100 dollars for the computer and 10 dollars a month for the internet). What this is doing is decreasing use of cyber cafes and children are actually teaching their parents.

They are working with Telco’s, local providers and retailers to get their product into all Indian homes and they think the price point is perfect as its the point by which mobile phones took off. 

This is a very interesting concept as he now has a portal in all of the peoples homes that they can then push multiple services to, including advertising, education, commerce, additional access, etc. 

He has now moved to talking about SMS and how SMS is the perfect channel to talk to people as it is non-intrusive. I disagree. I would hate to get sms advertisements on a regular basis. However in India this seems to be different as they have 3.7 million subscribers and within those people there have been 11 million subscriptions. These people receive 13 million SMS’s daily. 75% of these people read every SMS message and 45% forward them on to friends. My question is would this work in North America or is it just an Indian thing?

The following four points are the guiding philosophy of Emergic Innovations

-bold and ambitious goals

-focus on local non-consumers

-Simpler and Cheaper

-Limited Legacy Helps Leapfrog

Update

Rajesh is now off stage and John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins is coming up and he is being interviewed on stage by John Heileman from New York Magazine

John Heileman was in Chicago with Obama yesterday and has been with him for a few days and he has a few question for John Heileman (?’s from Obama)

Obama is appointing the first ever CTO of a country and he wants Doerr’s opinion on who it should be. Without even thinking about it he says Bill Joy would be his choice.

Next question is if Obama were to focus on one major policy initiative that would help the entrepreneurial climate what would it be? Most important thing he has to do is kick start the amount of research and innovation in energy. He also thinks we should staple a green card to the diploma of anyone who graduates from a degree in physical sciences and engineering in the US.

Another thing he suggests is to refocus DARPA. They used to be all about innovation (started the internet), but are now sliced up and only work on mission critical items, like in conflict robotics. He thinks they need to refocus on energy.

Now he is chatting about VC funding. 2007 saw a major peak at 100 billion dollars available in tech funds and over 50 billion of that went to internet companies. We have seen that go down to the mid 30′s recently and says that it could go as low as 16 billion by the end of 2009. He thinks the hardcore real entrepreneurs should see this as a way to hammer home their ideas.

Next question is, if we see a long term depression, what does that do for good ideas getting funded and the already funded going all the way to liquidity, etc. He believe the good companies will still get funded. Liquidity however is another question. We may not see that much liquidity for the next 3-4 years. Google is just not going to be buying these internet related start-ups and then who will? He thinks we should all get ready for the long haul and looking 4-5 years in the future instead of a quick exit. This is great as no longer will we waste our time with stupid ideas that flood the internet with useless material with a advertising based business model. 

He believe the following 11 items will help everyone weather the storm. 

1.) Act now 

2.) Protect the vital core of the business

3.) Make sure you have at least 18 months of cash

4.) Defer facility expansion

5.) reevaluate your R&D priorities

6.) renegotiate any contracts that you can

7.) remember everyone in the organization should be selling

8.) offer people equity instead of cash

9.) secure your cash

10.) for your revenue plan, develop and obsess on leading indicators

11.) over communicate with everyone

There was recently a Fortune Magazine article that said Kleiner Perkins is no longer investing in the internet. Since then they have made 9 internet related investments, so there is no truth to that statement. 

Now they are talking about the iPhone and the opportunity behind it. Why does the iPhone matter? It matters because they are person. They know who you are and where you are. They are broadband and always connected and most importantly, they are always in your pocket. He believes this platform is more important than the PC. The pace of these devices selling is wild and has exceeded the expectations of Steve Jobs. KP is looking to fund applications that take advantage of the platform. The obvious big one is the potential of location aware services.

They are now moving on to other internet related investments KP has made. He just showed us a video demo of CoolIris … possibly the coolest media search engine I have ever seen.

I am one of those 395,000 people and can say that I love their application. The form factor on the phone does make it hard to read the books at times, however if they were to integrate Spreeds technology into their platform, they could have a seriously killer application. I am very excited to see how this and the host of other e-book reader (that I am sure are currently waiting to be accepted by Apple) progress in the market. Maybe Amazon is wrong. Maybe people don’t want yet another device to carry around. Maybe people are happy enough reading their books on their phone while on the go and reserving the physical copies for when they get back to their home libraries. Only time will tell.

The problem with Bauerlein and so many like him is that he’s good at identifying a problem and poor at figuring out the solution.  With all due respect to Bauerlein, Nicholas Carr and the growing cadre of people (all much smarter and better educated than me) that claim that the greatest communication platform the world has ever seen is responsible for the dumbing-down of its users (and yes, I know that “dumbing” isn’t a word), I humbly suggest they jump off the bandwagon and look for a more practical solution.  Why?  Because people are not going to stop consuming copious quantities of written information via the internet any time soon. And because I have evidence that they’re wrong.

At Spreed Inc. we continue to believe in the power of the computer.  Rather than taking a step backward as the Luddite literati suggest, we understand that we’ve only just touched the surface, potential-wise, of computing and the internet.  There are issues to be sure. We continue to adhere to a medieval artifact when presenting written text on electronic devises, a mistake that Spreed has wagered would eventually be corrected.  But, in a relatively short period of time we’ve proven that speed and comprehension can be significantly improved (and improved over traditional paper-based, hard-copy reading) when delivering text to the user in the right format. Six young guys in an office over a one-year period accomplished this.  Imagine what some greater minds than us could accomplish here!

Other problems identified by Bauerlein may be worth discussion.  Is the internet leading to a bastardization of the English language and does it matter?  But he doesn’t address this and instead focuses on the absurd claim that the computer “conspires against certain intellectual habits requisite to liberal-arts learning”. Really? Nothing in here about how the internet allows for greater access to diverse ideas and more efficient and effective research?

There’s so much that is wrong with Bauerlein’s article, I’m not exactly sure what to criticize.  For someone blasting the academic capabilities of today’s youth, he sure takes some liberties with logic and fact.  I suggest he re-read Nielsen’s studies and look at the sorts of “reading” Nielsen was referring to (search pages, websites, etc. – not academic prose).  Of course they scan this material!  Furthermore, somehow “screen reading” (which he also cleverly changes to “fast scanning” and “screen scanning”) is responsible for 41% of professors labeling students “not well prepared”? How so? And what of the 48% labeled “somewhat well prepared”? Can we assume them all to be hard-copy reading Amish-folk who managed to make it to university having avoided the computer?  Finally, an academic of Bauerlein’s quality should know better than to cite 10 year old research on web reading when advances in content and the reading devices (flat panel monitors, iPhones, etc.) have rendered that research out of date.  I could go on.

Bauerlein is a Luddite with an apparent agenda to shock and sell books.  The title of his latest book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) says it all.  Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.  Historically, every generation hears these fear-mongering insults from previous generations, and I think history shows that each generation has proven to be better and more innovative than the last. Fortunately, access to quality content on the internet will improve and so will the ways we digest that information.  I’m doing my part to further that end and won’t allow Baurlein or Carr to stand in the way.
 

The Font Blog

Here is Dr. Larson’s bio, just reading this and his corresponding blog makes me wish I had the chance to buy him a coffee and pick his brain for an hour (or two, or three …):

I am a psychologist who has been working for Microsoft in different capacities since 1996. In 2000 I completed my PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Texas at Austin studying word recognition and reading acquisition. I joined the ClearType team in 2002 to help get a better scientific understanding of the benefits of ClearType and other reading technologies with the goal of achieving a great on-screen reading experience.

During my first year with the team I gave a series of talks on relevant psychological topics, some of which instigated strong disagreement. At the crux of the disagreement was that the team believed that we recognized words by looking at the outline that goes around a whole word, while I believed that we recognize individual letters. In my young career as a reading psychologist I had never encountered a model of reading that used word shape as perceptual units, and knew of no psychologists who were working on such a model. But it turns out that the model had a very long history that I was unfamiliar with.

Motoko’s Article can be found here 

Spreed:News was officially accepted into the web app site two days ago. It has been labelled as a staff pick and is currently the featured news application. Even if you have a first generation iPhone or an iTouch you can check out Spreed:News here.

Update: After 3 days Spreed:News is now on Apple’s most popular Web Applications list. Thank you to everyone who has provided us with feedback. Keep your eyes on Spreed as we continue to roll out more news feeds and increased functionality over the next few weeks.

On two other seperate notes; our iPhone application will be going live in the iTunes store later this week and we will be demoing Spreed:News tonight at DemoCamp18.

Here is a round up of some of the blog posts on Spreed:News from yesterday:

• Spreed:News Brings 3G Speeds to your Eyeballs
• Spreed for Speed
• Spreed Launches iPhone News Reader Called Spreed:News
• The Need for Spreed Comes to the iPhone
• Speed Reading Software for the iPhone Launches
• Spreed:News Tries to Redefine Reading
• Read News on the Go with New Mobile App from Canadian Developer
• Congratulations to Spreed:News on their iPhone Launch Today
• Spreed Launches Mobile News Reader for iPhone
• Spreed Inc. Releases iPhone Application that Lets People Rapidly Read News on the Go
• Spreed:News Mobile Demo

Thanks again to everyone that made the Spreed:News launch happen. For more articles click here

Using Spreed:News users can customize their news\blog feeds and read articles through the Spreed proprietary reader. Our proprietary reader organizes words in logical groupings that are easy for the brain to digest. By flashing these groupings, we are able to increase users reading speed and because there is no interaction necessary after the user chooses the article it is simple and easy to read the news on the go.

We are very excited to be releasing the the first of many products that Spreed has to offer. Please contact me (Dave Coleman) at dave@spreedinc.com , if you have any questions, comments or feedback.

For a copy of the press release documenting our launch click here and watch the demo of Spreed:News found below

One of our blog readers did point out that;

“…The new gen Sony Reader about to launch will read the ePUB format (a new standard in ebook formats put together by the IDPF), and ePUB is essentially XML. The Sony Reader with its E-ink display will therefore be able to have internal links (index entries, table of contents, references, etc.), re-sizeable and re-flowable text, etc. I.e. all the trappings of XML.”

This is a positive step, but until e-ink is able to display in colour and handle multimedia, there wil be significant usability limitations.

The work being done by these two great institutions is certainly starting to challenge our assumptions on how we read online. Professor Dave Nicholas’ work at CIBER, UCL (see the JISC national ebooks observatory project and survey here) found that:

‘[…] the length of time of an average e-book session is surprising, but it chimes very well with previous CIBER deep log studies: 34.6 per cent of university teachers say they spend less than ten minutes online, for students the figure is 23.2 per cent. Findings from the UCL SuperBook study suggest that around half the time that users spend on e-book platforms is actually devoted to navigating the information space and finding content, so these figures are even more surprising, even if the hypothesis that users are printing for subsequent reading holds true. Even more remarkably, university teachers are even more likely to dip in and out of e-book content, rather than even reading a single whole chapter. So much for that pejorative phrase, the ‘Google Generation’!’ [my emphasis]

And a similar study by Peter Jones at the University of Toronto (not yet published) found that:

‘A user may typically do a quick scan of an eBook for their immediate needs, and quit.’

One of their respondents, considered to be a ‘lead user’ of online scholarly platforms admitted

‘When it comes to web resources, if it doesn’t give me what I want in 5-10 minutes, I’m gone.’

So exactly what is going on here? Is the volume of information made available to us forcing us to skim and scan, and as a result are we losing the ability to ‘deep read’? And therefore the ability to fully digest and comprehend what we’re reading?

Like the rest of my peers, the volume of information I now have to work through on a daily basis seems to have grown exponentially. There are newspapers, emails, trade journals, conference proceedings, academic studies, meeting minutes, agendas, internal reports, supplier proposals, newsletters, licenses, contracts, industry blogs, white papers, and maybe, just maybe, some time to open my Sony Reader and enjoy some fiction at the end of the day (although thanks to some enterprising plugins I’m now able to convert much of my office reading into the Sony BBeB format too).

But hold on, when I recently read Wuthering Heights on my Sony Reader (for the first time, I’m ashamed to admit!), I poured over every word. Slowly, deliberately. Aren’t we all still doing this too? When I find a blog I connect with, I’ll spend far more time deep reading than with one less pertinent to my life. Even in preparing to write this piece I have spent considerable effort reading and re-reading the papers I’ve quoted.

The fact is, when I need to, I can deep read just as well as 20 years ago before the web was ubiquitous. I certainly haven’t lost that skill. And my children (aged 6 and 3) will also learn how to deep read, as opposed to scan. When I read Harry Potter to them every night at bedtime I certainly don’t skim through the less exciting parts. When we read their school books together we languish over every word, absorbing its meaning and context within the overall story. They wouldn’t want to skim even if they knew how!

Perhaps the way in which we are reportedly forced to read online and offline now is actually more about the search for the relevant. Our more developed skills in skim reading and scanning are formed by ‘the intersection of thee moving targets’ according to the UofT study:

• Awareness – what resources I know to be out there (which blogs, which newspapers, which wikis etc.).

• Collection – the range and completeness of the content in those resources.

• Findability – how easy it is to navigate within those resources.

So, getting back to the findings of these studies, i.e. that we typically spend less than 10 minutes in any given reading session… it strikes me that students are merely searching and navigating the content universe in short bursts, as we all do, trying to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. They gather together the relevant and pertinent content and, in many cases will print off the bits they need in order to take them back to their digs to digest and analyze at a much more thorough pace later.

The CIBER study describes this as ‘horizontal information seeking’:

A form of skimming activity, where people view just one or two pages from an academic site and then `bounce’ out, perhaps never to return. The figures are instructive: around 60 per cent of e-journal users view no more than three pages and a majority (up to 65 per cent) never return.

And from the same study, ‘squirreling behaviour’:

Academic users have strong consumer instincts and research shows that they will squirrel away content in the form of downloads, especially when there are free offers. [Don’t we all? Who can resist a freebie?]

I don’t believe there is such a thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ reading behaviour. I don’t believe the Google Generation is synonymous with dumbed-down reading as we disaggregate and re-aggregate books into ever smaller ‘chunks’ or ‘sound bites’ presented online. We’re just trying to find ever more efficient ways of navigating the volume of information presented to us on a daily (even hourly!) basis.

Perhaps we’re not changing our reading behaviour at all. Perhaps we’re merely developing new strategies in searching for what we need in an ever expanding and propagating universe of content. Perhaps what we’re really seeing is more widespread use of ‘horizontal information seeking’ which is entirely appropriate in our situation.

So…are we really changing the way we read?

Search me.

Mark Majurey
Digital Development Director at Taylor and Francis Group, the international academic publisher of journals and books.