“There’s various ways they could do it,” he said. “It’s not straightforward.”Even in the best of times, convention centers are loss leaders, said Mr. Sanders, the Texas professor. But the convention business has faced severe boom-bust cycles over the past two decades, with steep downturns after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the financial meltdown of 2008 and now the pandemic.On Tuesday, the organizer of BookExpo, the country’s largest publishing trade show, canceled the 2021 event and said it would rethink its format for the future, suggesting that it would include both “in-person and virtual offerings.” In recent years, …
