“There are not a lot of books being read these days.”

That’s a quote from a TV executive, who works with Mark Burnett, the man who gave us “The Apprentice,” the TV show that saved Donald Trump from bankruptcy and irrelevance and put him on the path to celebrity and fame, which Trump used to enrich himself and then to launch his campaign for president.

From a roundtable interview with five authors of Trump biographies:

Kruse: He made this transition from being an actual businessman, a person who does deals, some of which were good, to a grand promoter of his own name.

O’Brien: And the reality TV version of a successful businessman.

Barrett: This is the ultimate promotion of his own name. This is the ultimate brand.

Kruse: But the fact is that there is a middle ground. There is, basically, 1990-ish to 1995 where he is a failure.

O’Brien: He’s in desperate straits. He almost had to go personally bankrupt.

Kruse: The success is that he didn’t die a business death. The success was survival.

O’Brien: And he was a survivor, to his credit. He survived.

Kruse: Why, though, wasn’t that failure?

O’Brien: Because of The Apprentice. I think singularly because of The Apprentice. But he was a joke in between 1993 and 2003.