This year, I read fewer business books than I usually do. You probably did, too. The category’s sales are down 20% since March, according to NPD’s Bookscan.
It’s not hard to understand why. A lot happened this year to distract us from our usual routines: a pandemic, a recession, an election.
Faced with these upheavals, it might not have seemed like books, particularly business books, would have much advice on how to navigate a world that, on many fronts, was hard to recognize. Many of the books published this year were written before Covid-19.
And yet, this was also a year in which business played a tremendous role in how we responded to the pandemic, from the creation of vaccines to our shift to remote work and e-commerce to the growing dominance of big tech in our economy. We saw the acceleration of business trends and the upending of old business models. How could the business books of 2020 inform our understanding of these shifts?