I was interested in this article on the health or otherwise of the publishing of serious non-fiction, in this weekend's Guardian Review. It starts with a rather apocalyptic tone and ends up in effect concluding that the reading and selling of non-fiction of the non-celebrity, non-misery kind is actually in good health.

One of the debunkers of the apocalypse hypothesis is Scott Pack, whom I heard speak across the table at a Competition Commission inquiry into the acquisition of the Ottakars bookstore chain by Waterstones. The literary, Guardian-reading (and Guardian-writing) classes at the time painted Pack as the man mainly responsible for the dumbing-down and homogenising of the British public's reading tastes. He was then the buyer for Waterstones, and clearly drove a tough bargain.

The argument went that he forced every branch to display the same narrow range of titles and there was no hope for new authors, or minority interests, in terms of accessing the prime real estate of the browsing tables at the front of the store. Publishers and authors queued up to tell the inquiry group that if the merger went ahead, there would be a further narrowing of range and less diversity and willingness to experiment with new authors or types of book.

We concluded that there was no evidence to support these claims. Apart from the existence of other types of retail outlet, especially the internet, nobody – neither publishers nor booksellers – could predict what would sell well, and retailers have a strong incentive to carry a wide enough range that the next bestseller or the next strong genre can emerge from impulse buys and word of mouth, as well as ads, reviews and online networks. Waterstones was not the monolith that the critics claimed, as its management data confirmed.

In the years since the inquiry, it seems to me that all sorts of popular non-fiction books have done very well. This includes economics books, where a whole new popular genre has emerged in recent years thanks to titles like Tim Harford's Undercover Economist and of course Freakonomics. While I wouldn't conclude that there are no worrying trends in publishing – after all, there are an awful lot of dreadful celeb titles out there being bought, and a serious economic downturn to contend with  – there seems plenty of vigour left in non-fiction publishing and reading.