>There is a sense that devoting oneself to reading a book over 200 pages has become a major and possibly insuperable commitment in a way that it possibly wasn't 10 or 20 years ago
Sigh. The worst form of anxiety is anecdotal anxiety.
Yes. And indeed, in the rest of the article, the author points out that your quote above is a rather "parochial concern", and that "there will always be a higly literate future for the highly literate".
(I think the author would have done better skipping the bombastic "digital underclass" title; the subtitle "How technology has become a barrier to social mobility" would help swift readers to not miss his point...)
Sigh. The worst form of anxiety is anecdotal anxiety.