Tim Parks, whose novel Europa was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1997, said the traditional long works would have to be broken down into bitesize chunks to allow for competing demands on the modern reader's attention. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Parks, 59, said that "the seductions of email and messaging and Skype and news websites constantly updating on the very instrument you use" meant "every moment of serious reading has to be fought for".
As a result, he said, novels would have to adapt to "the state of constant distraction we live in and how that affects the very special energies required for tackling a substantial work of fiction - for immersing oneself in it and then coming back to it over what could be weeks, or months, each time picking up the threads of the story or stories, the patterning of internal reference, the positioning of the work within the context of other novels."