What is the pronunciation of parenthesized ‘read’?

In sentences like the following one, what is the pronunciation of the word read? I have always pronounced it red, as past-tense, but I have, a couple of times, heard it pronounced reed, as instruction to the reader.

The text was unhelpful (read a waste of money) for the class.

(As a side note/question, is there a specific term for that usage of read or its parenthesized sub-sentence?)

I've always said it reed, understanding it in the instruction-to-the-reader sense. I can't have heard somebody say it out loud more than a handful of times in my life, but in none of the cases did the speaker say red.

The two forms of the word are spelled the same in English, but the same construction exists in Swedish, and as the spelling differs it's clearly in the form of an instruction to read:

Texten var värdelös (läs pengaslöseri) för klassen.

Read [rid] translates to läs while read [rɛd] translates to läste.

I haven't heard it spoken much either, but I have heard both. Both make sense to me. The "red" pronunciation could be just as much an instruction to the reader as "reed", simply expressed differently. (Imagine demonstrating something, and saying "it's done like so", or saying "do it like so".)