Interesting Tim O'Reilly piece on Radar: All culture is being driven to short formats, both because short is faster to consume and because short is simpler to collaboratively produce.
Clearly there's a personal bias here because I was trained on the long stuff - but I do think we still need full texts to genuinely immerse ourselves in a topic and deeply appreciate it. Depending on the subject matter, the immersion comes through reading or - and I suspect there's another culture change driver here - through doing the material. The modern mind simply isn't ready to be schooled in the old way. It wants to produce.