A brief sanity check amidst the thunderbolts: the publishing market is not in terminal decline. That’s the optimist’s take on today’s news from The Bookseller, anyway. Catherine Neilan writes that despite a dramatic drop of 9.4% in the value of third quarter sales last year, over the whole of 2008 British publishers recorded a drop of just 0.2% in overall sales value. And, the UK Publishers Association confirmed, there has been a 12% increase in value of sales and 13 % increase in volume over the last four years. An estimated 855 million books were sold by British publishers in 2008, the same quantity as in 2007 but in far bleaker conditions. Home sales may have dropped by 2% overall but export sales increased in the same ratio.

Do we really expect things to keep on growing year after year, with never a pause for digestion? If it happened to people, we’d all be giants wheeling our stomachs in front of us on trolleys, a la 2001 AD. Maybe it’s not so bad that the swollen bellies are deflating a little. Repeat after me: it’s going to be ok. We’ll get through it somehow. This is not the Apocalypse.