This concept has sparked considerable debate and interest since it was highlighted during Slovenia’s Guest of Honour programme at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2023.
Two years earlier, at Readmagine 2021, we organized a working day prior to the sessions in front of the (mask-wearing) audience. The culmination of months of work, we tried to offer answers or a wakeup call for the book world in the midst of the pandemic. On that occasion, Readmagine had a less global scope. We wanted a European response at an exceptional moment. The harsh situation of the pandemic was an opportunity to strengthen the European approach (and I still wonder, in the summer of 2025, if that is something we can now consider accomplished).
The three working groups’ rapporteurs, presented their Europe-wide ‘Modest Proposals’: European Public Policieswere presented by Enrico Turrin, Business Model Innovation in Europe by José Manuel Anta, and Reading Promotionby Miha Kovač.
I remember how compelling Miha’s presentation was, and it came as no surprise when I saw the clarity and relevance of the Ljubljana manifesto. A few days ago, over a summer conversation with Professor Kovač, I asked him why the organisers of the Slovenian pavilion decided that a manifesto on reading was appropriate.
Miha shared the feeling other guest of honour pavilions had left him, with messages that “wanted to predominantly show their modernity by exposing all kinds of -sometimes book related but often not – installations, artefacts, digital gadgets and tools” and added: “the implicit message was that books and book reading do not matter much anymore. My idea – as a co-curator of Slovenian program – was to go against this flow and put books back at the center of the pavilion. Plus, the idea was to produce a statement on why reading long, complex texts still matter”.
When I’ve written texts and given lectures on the current state of reading and its challenges, I’ve used ‘higher-level reading’ in various ways. For this reason, I’m very interested to hear Miha Kovač define this concept:
“From my perspective, higher level reading has two dimensions. First, it is an understanding that there are different kinds of reading, with different cognitive outcomes. Let me mention just two. When we, for example, surf the web, we skim all kinds of informational resources which are usually a mix of audio, visual and textual content; we do this by quickly changing focus, and we follow what attracts our attention or what we are looking for. On the other hand, when we immerse ourselves in a complex text, our attention needs to be focused only on a written narrative; as shown by a set of studies, the best possible medium for this kind of reading is print. Higher level reading requires understanding these kinds of differences among modes of reading and accordingly adapting our reading strategies. Besides understanding such different modalities of reading, I see reding of long complex texts as a crucial part of higher-level reading. There are two reasons for this: first, this kind of reading is an important training tool for thinking, and second, I am afraid that we are losing this ability and failing to grasp why reading of linear complex texts matters”.
Miha and I share work and conversations within the framework of various projects (SIDT, ThinkPub…) and I have confessed to him the opposition I encounter when defending the relevance of this concept and the urgent need for dedicated effort on this within the education system or when formulating reading policies. Kovač answers this scepticism: “There are a few – let me say so – objections to this kind of reading. One is that it is elitist. Here, my answer is simple: it is not elitist, because anybody can achieve this ability, providing there is motivation and equal access to quality education. It is of course true that the concept is closely connected with Western civilization; yet I believe that – like quantum mechanics – it belongs to humanity. Another objection is that what matters is that people read, and the complexity of what they read is not important. Studies done on this show this is an assumption without any scientific background: cognitive outcomes are closely related to the complexity of texts one reads”.
I am convinced that his academic perspective on the definition of higher-level reading and its positive impact on ‘critical thinking’ is very useful, starting with his perspective on this term: “Let me first stress that I see the notion of critical thinking as inflated and overused and propose that of analytical thinking”.
The impact of higher-level reading on analytical thinking is clear: “…to understand dialogue in film or TV you’ll need to know the 3,000 most common word families. For understanding more complex texts, such as novels or essays, you need to learn 8,000 to 9,000 lemmas [A word family or lemma refers to a base word and all its inflected forms, such as “run,” “runs,” “ran,” and “running,” which are considered variations of the same word]. Thus, if one wants to discuss complex issues, one can only do this with a broad vocabulary, that comes via reading complex texts. This brings us back to the point that higher level reading is a training for analytical thinking”.
We argue that one of the positive impacts of higher-level reading is directly related to the ability to understand complex concepts, to discuss our positions on these concepts, and even to understand the arguments of those who defend a different idea or propose a different solution to something that concerns us as a society.
Those of us of a certain age may feel somewhat surprised that the formulation of political programs can be based on a lack of fact-based arguments and a search for the best solution to every challenge our society faces.
I love how Kovač relates the rationality of a democratic society to scientific rationality: “I understand democracy and science as two sides of the same coin: both seek to make sense of an unpredictable and messy world, in which there are no black-and-white answers. Science does this with hypotheses that are considered valid until refuted by new facts and theories. Similarly, in democracies, we try to regulate the society through public policies, which we change if we find they don’t work, or we come up with better ones. To be fully operational, both science and democracy require freedom of expression and a concept of truth (of course, I see the latter not as an absolute dogma, but as knowledge that is considered valid until proven wrong by facts and reasoning, i.e. by analytical thinking). Both freedom of expression and the concept of truth are questioned these days: ‘alternative facts’ substitute truth for opinions, and freedom of expression is under attack by left and right woke/cancel culture. These developments scarily remind me of my youth in socialist Yugoslavia”.
I think the more books I read, the more complex they are, the more different they are from each other, the more I appreciate the thought-provoking power of Max Weber’s works, which we had to unravel in law school when we were students.
This is part of the correlation between reading and certain positive values, such as its positive impact on democratic coexistence. If we draw an analogy with economic theory, this type of reading produces a ‘positive externality’ in the field of democracy (it is an externality because it is not the objective of reading or the promotion of reading, and it is positive because greater reading capacity leads to a higher level of democratic coexistence).
Please let’s write down in our reading promotion notebooks the idea that practicing higher-level reading has a positive impact on the development of our analytical thinking as one of the most positive things we can put effort into.
Miha Kovač is professor at the Department of Library and Information Science and Book Studies at the University of Ljubljana. In his publishing career in the late eighties and nineties, he worked as editorial director in the two largest Slovene publishing houses, DZS and Mladinska knjiga and as an editorial director of the Slovene edition of National Geographic Magazine. He is the author of more than fifty articles and four books on reading and book publishing. His main research interest is publishing and reading statistics. In 2020 he published his first mass-market book «Read to Breathe» in different languages.