Notebook: Unmerger

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

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On Halloween night (Boo!, as The New York Times’s books news editor put it) United States District Court judge Florence Y. Pan enjoined Penguin Random House, America’s largest book publisher, from acquiring Simon & Schuster, its fourth largest book publisher. At the time the deal was announced, in the fall of 2020, observers expected it to go through without a hitch, as the marriage of then largest and second-largest publishers Viking Penguin and Random House had in 2013, to form the country’s (for now) largest ever book publisher. The consolidation of book publishing into ever-larger modules, controlled by ever-larger conglomerates in media and other unrelated industries, has been the state of play in book publishing since the 1980s, when it was justified, perhaps tautologically, by a perceived need to front negotiating partners substantial enough to secure favorable terms with the then-dominant bookstore chains—just as now executives of both firms (and others) justified such a merger as a needed defense for authors against the mighty power of Amazon. Bigger players seem to summon forth opposing bigger players: the fortunate few future authors of the promised juggernaut Penguin-Random-House-Simon-Schuster would also secure favorable terms with the also-consolidated, supply-chain-stressed paper, printing, and book distribution industries. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had given the effort his own assist by culling the field of the “sickly gazelles” of smaller publishers.)