A New York Post opinion piece by Keith J. Kelly contends that there's been some exaggeration about the fate of the book industry. What he's referring to is the wide-ranging commentary in recent times about the death of publishing. To be fair, most of the observations center on digital books upstaging print books and ultimately obliterating print publishing. Others, however, have said that our being more and more tethered to mobile devices that feed us other multimedia content, will mean fewer of us will be reading books.  That decline is already evident.

Take for example Richard Nash who declared at 2010's BookExpo America, the largest book trade show in the U.S.,"The copyright is dead!" There was also this more gloomy forecast from the Guardian's Evan Morrison in a 2011 article where he writes, "Yes, absolutely, within 25 years the digital revolution will bring about the end of paper books. But more importantly, ebooks and e-publishing will mean the end of "the writer" as a profession. Ebooks, in the future, will be written by first-timers, by teams, by speciality subject enthusiasts and by those who were already established in the era of the paper book. The digital revolution will not emancipate writers or open up a new era of creativity, it will mean that writers offer up their work for next to nothing or for free. Writing, as a profession, will cease to exist."

Yet what Kelly saw at BookExpo America was something entirely differently. The publishers he interviewed who had been attending the expo for decades said that this was the largest turnout they had seen.David Rosenthal, a publishing bigwig, said, "I've been coming to this thing for 25 years, and this is the most crowded first day I can remember." Rosenthal believed that the attraction was brand-name authors.

According to Kelly's reporting, publishers are pivoting and reinventing but they aren't necessarily looking to transition to another job in another industry because they believed the demise of book publishing was eminent.