Like millions of others, I’m headed for the beach next week. My favorite part of the ritual, other than packing a suitcase full of shorts and flip flops, is finding the perfect books to accompany me on the flight and at the water’s edge. This year, my traveling companion is pushing hard for the work of Ayn Rand. My reaction to the lovely gifts of The Fountainhead (720 pages) and Atlas Shrugged (1088 pages) was an indignant cry, “They’re so LONG!”

I was, frankly, shocked at myself, and wondering what happened to the youngster who read all seven of the Narnia books.

It appears I am not alone.

Yesterday’s New York Times features a piece by Motoko Rich (registration required) which discusses how America’s teens are loathe to tackle books, but instead spend long hours reading or texting sound-bite like snippets on Facebook. Lest we attack only the young, Nicholas Carr’s cover story in the July/August Atlantic Monthly says readers of all ages, including him, are similarly shunning long format text.

“Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy,” writes Carr. “My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Wow. I admit that half of me felt better to be in the same camp with Nicholas Carr, but the other half got mighty nervous for the publishing world at large. Carr’s piece cites research, ranging from a U.K. educational consortium to a psychologist at Tufts, that says both how and what we read is fast changing.

Maybe it’s not all bad news. Maybe it means the epic novel will go the way of the encyclopedia — published online in digestible pieces. Maybe the next Charles Dickens will pen his masterpiece via Twitter. As for me, Rand is in my suitcase but that doesn’t mean I won’t be sneaking into the airport bookstore for a copy of Runner’s World or People for a somewhat shorter bit of escapist reading while I’m gone.