The publishing industry has many vulnerabilities when it comes to a pandemic like the recent one. It was already fighting against the onsla...
The publishing industry has many vulnerabilities when it comes to a pandemic like the recent one. It was already fighting against the onslaught of social media platforms, then trying to decide whether or not to plunge into digital publishing – totally or partially. And then came Covid-19, with the unravelling effects of the lockdown on the industry. Yet, judging from the variety of popular science books that have come out on Covid-19, the publishing world seems to havefought well despite these comorbidities. It’s certainly alive, if not kicking.
Most of these are “crash books” – “written in a short time at junctures when a lot of people very much want to know about a certain issue…written by people who just happen to know a bit about the topic and poised to go”, in the words of Debora MacKenzie, whose book Covid-19: The pandemic that never should have happened and how to stop the next one came out in June 2020. But some books have managed to go beyond the superficiality of talking merely about the structure of coronavirus or the epidemiologic statistics, and ask some hard questions. That’s the silver lining.
A quick glance at the books on Covid-19, from the easiest to the abstruse,...
