Essential? Different? Exceptional? The Book Trade and Covid-19

The lockdown conditions enforced by Covid-19 in 2020 have affected the book trade as with all other sectors of cultural, social and economic life. This commentary addresses claims to bookshops being ‘essential’ (and hence should remain open alongside other essential retailers and services), and sets them alongside prior claims of books as ‘different’ to mass-produced consumer goods. The commentary see these two claims as stemming from a narrative of book trade exceptionalism, which sit ill at ease with the urgencies of global pandemic, while also demonstrating some of the longer-term infrastructural challenges of the publishing industry, including the amount of economic and algorithmic power held by Amazon. The commentary calls for a reconsideration of how some of the values we might claim to have learned from books enable us to show solidarity to other sectors of cultural life, and society more generally.