Book publishing is used to dire forecasts for its future; the industry’s funeral has been prematurely anticipated for decades. Publishing was supposed to be killed off at various points by television, the Internet, and the general public’s apathy toward reading. But it’s always managed to scrape by — even if, in these scattered times, it’s been increasingly on the back of huge successes like The Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter series. The stagnant-but-relatively stable industry has also long been seen as “recession-proof”; the thinking goes that consumers will still spend on small, non-luxe goods, such as books, during a downturn.
