But wait.

Books are not the only written media. Your post, the one I am responding to here, is written media. I read it, and it’s about 3 pages long, give or take.

I’ll be reading all day long, all week long. Some of that might come from books, some from news, some from posts like this, but it’s all reading. If your concern is that people are not being exposed to word order, most actually are, whether they read any books or not.

I don’t think the picture is as glum as book reading statistics indicate.