Diminishing Ability?

[...] the very act of reading is undergoing such subtle and sweeping changes that it's hard to know what it will look like 10 or 20 years from now. Not only are readers gaining more and more of their "content" via screens rather than paper; they are doing so in ever smaller and more fragmented bites that undermine the richly contextualized interpretations and narratives of traditional history writing.

When I reflect on how little time my students now spend reading books-indeed, how much less time I devote to such reading than when I was younger-I worry that the human ability to navigate book-length texts may be diminishing in ways that could have worrisome consequences for the long-form prose we historians cherish.

From "Writing History in a Digital Age" by Christopher Shea (http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2012/01/04/writing-history-in-a-digital-age/?mod=WSJBlog)

I believe it. For several years, I stopped reading books for pleasure. And I noticed that I was finding it harder to stay focused on longer pieces. Now that I've started reading a bit more, it's come back. Note to self: keep reading as often as I can!