I read Federation back in 2012, having had the paperback for awhile at that point. It’s a novel that’s hard not to adore if you’re a Trek fan, and in many ways it’s what everyone wanted Generations to be that it wasn’t. Indeed, that film still feels like a middling quality TNG two-parter with a TOS prologue and epilogue to bring it up toward the two hour mark.
I will say that novels being superseded by on-screen events didn’t stop either Federation or the earlier alt-first contact novel Strangers From The Sky getting reprinted in paperback as part of the Trek 50th in 2006. Nor stopped them from selling well on Kindle even now.