Earlier this month the Association of American Publishers reported that net audiobook revenue surged 29.5 percent in 2017, compared to the previous year. The brightest might be the audiobook boom that’s taken place over the last few years.

Literary fiction is in crisis-sales are down 25 percent since 2012-and the bestseller list is dominated by books with “Trump” and/or “Russia” in their titles, but as a whole the industry has escaped what used to be a constant sense of crisis.Īnd if the overall picture is “meh,” there are some bright spots.

Though hobbled, the industry’s most important retailer, Barnes & Noble, is still standing, while a rise in the number of indie bookstores has provided an important feel-good-story. Print books, thanks in part to pricing strategies that disincentivize e-book purchasing, have inched upward. The steep fluctuations of the post-Kindle years, in which rapid e-book growth seemed poised to upend the industry, have settled-for traditional publishers, at least, e-book sales have sharply declined over the past few years. Book publishing has reached a point of what could be called stable insecurity.

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