Comment 14 by Metamag :

AMID the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile.

Pretty dumb way of putting it. I haven't read a paper book in 4 years. I read 2 books per week but either on laptop, iphone or with ebook reader, all digital devices.

Once you get an ebook reader, you can never go back to clumsy impractical paper books(finally are gone the days where you constantly have to twist hundreds of pages of paper in bed) in which you can't do instant searches, comments, dictionary, adjust the font size, etc.

I think "squawks and pings" is a rather oblique way of referring to the shortened attention span resulting from hopping from tweet to blog to facebook feed to texting, not necessarily following a sustained narrative beyond at most a two-page article.