Today, the crisis of deep reading has been a pressing social problem, however, there has been no clear definition or explanation of deep reading so far. In order to pursue the coping strategies of the crisis, this paper tries to card the concept of deep reading and seek the essence and the intrinsic meaning of it in the context of new technology revolution.

    To achieve this goal, an explicit definition of deep reading is required and the core of such definition is to understand the “deep” in deep reading. Previous relevant researches can be divided into three dimensions on relevant views—the first dimension involves information acquisition, which has some key words like thinking, understanding and exploring; the second dimension is related to feelings, which contains key words as pleasure, emotion, immersion and involvement; the third one is connected with communication with key words as communication, conversation and interaction. These dimensions all have one consensus that readers of deep reading are not just passive receivers any more but more like active participants. Considering that the participation of readers regards behavioral involvement, cognitive involvement and emotional involvement, the “deep” in deep reading needs the interaction of those three involvements to realize.

    What can be the main cause of reading engagement if regarding profound involvement as a feature of deep reading? Because deep reading is both a participation action for readers and the interaction result of external environment and the reading object, it is hard to explain these two aspects comprehensively based on the common “binary opposition theory” of psychology-vs-physics or rationality-vs-sensibility. While, there is another path of understanding provided to us by the “enactive cognition” theory from cognitive science in late years. According to the holism thought of the theory, this paper defines deep reading as a highly involving behavior resulted from the active impetus generated by the encounter between readers, the organism with mental ability, and befitting reading materials under the right condition.

    What is the most valuable deep reading currently? To answer that, this paper analyzes the meanings of deep reading for readers and society in digital era, and points out that the contemporary significance of deep reading does not only have the value of promoting knowledge learning but also the value of combination between readers and content, which is the compound value of reading involving knowledge value, recreational value, aesthetic value and moral value.

    Could it be possible to find a way to bring people overwhelmed by information technology back to the joy of deep reading as the reading habits in digital era has changed completely? This paper discusses three potential strategies of resolving the crisis of deep reading. The first one is to create encounter opportunity between readers and befitting text, which means to capture readers interest of reading materials at first and then help readers seek the suitable text through more explicit “maps” or “signs”. The second is to provide an experience guidance which is to make readers immerse and enjoy the pleasure of deep reading by exploiting the abundant experience created by new technology. The last one is to bring readers back to conversational nature of reading, in another word, to reinforce the reading engagement of readers by new social technology, and guide the reading back to its “dialogue” essence. 1 fig. 53 refs.