The pandemic was in some ways was pretty good for books: audiobook sales boomed and print book sales held on instead of dying as people were predicting at the dawn of the ebook era.

The tragic paradox is that in this winner-take-all publishing climate, what's good for books isn't necessarily good for most authors. The absolute number of books sold might be rising, but if all the sales and money are going to a relatively small number of authors at the top, that hurts all the others (as does the Amazon hegemony I mentioned in the story).

In the past year the imbalance has showed up in Colleen Hoover's dominance of the fiction market: At one point, she'd written something like 11 out of 15 books on the USA Today fiction bestseller list (which others and I wrote about at the time). That's nuts. Apart from the unequal distribution of profits, it's discouraging to authors to have so little chance of breaking her stranglehold on the lists.

I also wonder about the effect of the pandemic on libraries (which may have suffered from the Covid-related closures or just people's fear of going in). Those stats are probably available, and I may write about them if I can find them. But I hadn't thought about looking them up until I read your comment. Thanks for the inspiration!