And the sort of authors whose works tend to stand the test of time - the great novelists and poets, the philosophers and theologians - are getting it from both directions: The Google effect makes it harder to write War and Peace, and harder to read it.
Count me a non-believer in the Google Effect. It's hard to write another War and Peace because it's generally difficult to write anything that will hold up for 100 years or more, especially longform fiction novels. This is related to the point that it's difficult to write 1200 pages of anything (or 500, for that matter), because the logistics of creation are on a different scale--one cannot possibly keep it all going at once. Hence so few people attempting longform work; I would also suspect, by way of speculation, that people who excel at shorter formats generally do not have skills that translate to longer work.
As for the difficulty of maintaining attention: War and Peace presents its own problems, because a lot is going on and it takes some effort to follow everything (the first 100 pages of any Russian novel, for me, are an attempt to keep the names straight). For everything else, the ugly truth is that most writing is decidedly mediocre, the internet being no exception--this is certainly true of academic writing. I mean it as no insult to say most people do not approach the level of Tolstoy. Everyone writes a poor page, chapter, or blog post on occasion, but we forgive this because of an interest in the writer's work more generally, or else a particular interest in the subject matter. And, of course, subject matter on the internet varies widely. No one gets bent out of shape if they don't read every story in a newspaper, or end up skimming a number of them, and this seems the closest analogy to blog reading.
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