Books and reading in the Muslim world: a crisis? really?

Regarding this article by Hatem Bazian about what he sees as a crisis of reading and books in the Muslim world: there is nothing that he mentions that is unique to the Muslim world and that is not peculiar to the technological age that we live in.  I suggest that Hatem asks his class, as I do regularly, and see how many of his American students have not read a whole book in their lives.  I ask this question regularly in my new classes and the percentage of those who admit that they have not read a book in their lives is steadily increasing.  If anything, I find (put aside the silly UNDP report funded by UAE and Saudi Arabia regimes) that Arab youths are quite active in reading books but pirated books on the web, and the volume of pirated books on the Arabic web is enormous (and there are even applications where you can find tens of thousands of pirated books, and I only lament those lazy pirates who miss to copy the bibliography or endnotes in books).  So there is no crisis in the Muslim world: it is a global crisis.