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In the spring, the German book industry experienced the ultimate humiliation.
With the beginning of the lockdown, when bookstores had to close almost everywhere, the mail order company Amazon suddenly changed the prioritization of its items.
While books for preferred customers often arrived the day after the order was placed, the delivery of even current bestsellers suddenly took a week or more.
Diapers and baby food were given priority over Franz Kafka and Ferdinand von Schirach.
Krasser could hardly have made it clear that the book industry, which likes to see itself as a pillar of the democratic public and cultural bearer of the first order, is not as systemically relevant and vital as it would have liked to convince itself.
The talk of the book as "spiritual nourishment", of literature as a remedy for the soul, turned out to be a mere metaphor.
The book trade experienced a screeching halt in the spring.
The Leipzig Book Fair was canceled and reading festivals such as Lit.Cologne had to be canceled at the last minute.
All of this caught a cultural division cold, which has not exactly bristled with self-confidence in recent years.
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Debates about the supposed massive loss of buyers, concentration processes in retail, the challenges of digitization, competition from Netflix and Co. - all of this had shaken the self-image of a world that was still a sales giant in the cultural industry and could always feel as the leading medium.
In Germany, debates came from books or were at least triggered by writers - from Böll to Botho Strauss, from Enzensberger to Walser (that's still the case, see the outrage over Monika Maron's expulsion from S. Fischer).
Was literature really just a pseudo-giant in the feature pages?
For a few weeks in the spring, it looked as if the pandemic could deal the decisive blow to an already ailing industry.
Total sales remain stable
And then came the summer of readers.
It is one of the most astonishing and gratifying developments of this terrible year that book sales soared as soon as the lockdown ended in May.
As early as autumn, the sharp drops in spring were compensated for in many points, and in some cases even exceeded.
Some publishers already experienced a kind of Christmas business in the summer, which is why the current failures are no longer as significant as in other branches of the retail trade.
You will be billed at the end, but the total turnover should at least have remained stable in the end.
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Particularly gratifying: Not only the mail order giants benefited from the continuing hunger for books, but also the stationary book trade and especially small, local, specialized bookshops around the corner with their regular customers.
Expensive top locations in pedestrian zones, train stations or shopping malls, on the other hand, are not necessarily only an advantage in lockdown times.
But perhaps the feelings of crisis of the past few years were also decisive: many bookstores have long been offering their own online service;
and the publishers had already opened up digital marketing channels.
But that now helped to compensate for the loss of readings, which was nevertheless extremely hard and frustrating, especially for many authors.
The cancellation of the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, despite all the hygiene concepts and digital ideas, was then extremely regrettable, but no longer triggered a mood of doom.
Not just shallow entertainment
Because the good news of this book year is: people want to read.
And not only life-aid guides and cheap entertainment, but also heavyweights such as prominent biographies, historical non-fiction books, current fiction, literary classics.
Well-known trade publishers such as Piper, Dumont, Klett-Cotta or CH Beck are expecting very good annual results.
This year's book award winner Anne Weber sold more than 100,000 copies of “Annette, a heroine epic” - of a novel in verse, mind you.
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One interesting detail lies in the above-average success of fantasy literature.
Klett-Cotta publisher Tom Kraushaar, who owns the Hobbit Press with Tolkien's “Lord of the Rings”, says with astonishment that it has achieved double-digit growth rates even without a real blockbuster.
People already have enough reality on their hands.
The simple explanation for this strength in the crisis would be that most have more time to read.
You may or may not want to travel;
don't go out or to the pop concert;
Operas, theaters, museums and cinemas are closed.
As an inevitably lonely business, reading is the perfect cultural technique for lockdown.
Of course, streaming services and computer games, which are in any case booming, also benefited from the desire for entertainment and diversion in foreign worlds.
But the system requirements for physical books are still unrivaled low.
In terms of hardware, you only need a reading lamp.
And if you want to stare at a screen out of bad habit, there are also e-books for you.
But the sheer compulsion to pass the time alone can explain the rising sales of children's books.
Parents affected by daycare closings or homeschooling are probably already creating a boom here, desperately trying to keep their children busy or trying to keep them away from the Playstation.
No, there must be more in the book, what distinguishes it from other - in case of doubt also cheaper - media and time destruction machines.
Only in 2020, with its many empty times, do many people seem to notice that in the long run it will not get them any further to watch ghost games on television every day or to train themselves to be the perfect first-person shooter at night.
The book combines immersion in other lives and distant worlds, be it historical or fictional, with the promise of inner self-perfection.
Education, the old Humboldtian promise of a holistically trained personality, still finds its first and most effective instrument in the book.
Everyone knows the deeply satisfying feeling of finally having “read through” a long tome that has been on the shelf for years, be it Proust's “Search for Lost Time” or Yuval Noah Harari's not really “Short History of Mankind”.
A book uses the imagination of the reader differently than a TV series, however complex.
Every picture in the head, every sound, every smell must first be converted from nonsensual language.
This is one of the reasons why reading takes so long.
But that's exactly why it leaves such a lasting, lasting impression.
The fact that fantasy is particularly popular doesn't just have to mean a desire for escapism, for an escape into a world that is as dissimilar as possible to the dreary present.
Each story can serve to use the boring time for a meaningful experience, to turn the boring and dawdling into a spiritual adventure.
Real adventures and real encounters will come back.
But even now the books can prepare us like nothing else for that.