Great point, but I have to wonder if there is a slight dumbing down as well. I do a ton of reading, but as a child it was almost exclusively long form. The technology I use most often has helped change that, and I read probably just as much or more, but shorter articles and fewer books. I hate to admit it, but I know the content is not as good, but the format has become habitual. While this is my experience with my consumption, I sometimes wonder what that means for people growing up in today's world who consume, for a baseline, shorter and lower quality content. What effect does that have on their output? At any rate, I think it would be negligible compared to the factor you cited, -access.
I totally agree. I've also noticed a drastic shift with the content I consume moving from mainly long form and short. I've actually started to try to move that back a bit. But one thing I've noticed is that long form has suffered as well and seems to be a little cheaper and poorer quality (on the whole) than I remembered. I wonder if authors feel pressure to compete with bloggers and this plays out to some extent in the quality of their work.
Hmm. Regarding long form, there has always been so many bad bad bad terrible books out there, and more every day. For me it's always been about selecting the great reads that are out there. There will always be dissertations launching books, and niche experts and popularizers putting the time in. But I just think that short form lends itself to dumbing down in many of the ways it is packaged for us. It is packaged to live alongside advertisements and mingles with that. Then there is the internet that coined the term link-bait. At least I'm not the only one :) I've made an effort to read more, longer works over the past couple years as well.