Unlike the Staples - Office Depot merger, about which I couldn't care less, or a tech giant stifling smaller competition by buying it:<p>These are two giants in a very small oligopoly. I can't see <i>any</i> consumer benefit to a merger, and lots of potential for harm. This is what antitrust law is supposed to be all about.<p>I suppose you could argue they're in a declining business and need to cut costs. But I don't think either would admit to that.
If you allow this company to happen then they’ll be able to set the market price for buying and selling books to libraries, bookstores, bookstores, etc….<p>If this were to happen they would also be able to limit how many books are being printed, and therefore they may censor authors and books that have unpopular or controversial opinions. They’ll also try to control the amount of books that get sold to the public because it could increase the prices of buying them in bookstores.
> The largest five publishers control 90% of the market.<p>This is not dissimilar to the music market. It used to be controlled by 5 companies, now it's down to three.<p>The result? Creators are paid peanuts while the blame is shifted away from actual companies controlling the market to someone else.<p>As a former employee of Storytel, the Swedish audiobook app, I'm really glad for this decision. Penguin Random House already has an insane outsized and rarely positive influence on the market. The merger would've only made things worse.
It's incredible to me that this is only a 2.2B merger, when I think about how much space in my house is dedicated to books, and how much of my discretionary spending is for books (plus indirect demand through libraries.)<p>On the other hand, I doubt whether any of the last 10-20 books I've bought were Penguin Random House...
> <i>Executives from PRH and Simon & Schuster argued that ... the merger would actually benefit writer pay, because it would lead to savings and allow them to spend more on books.</i><p>I snorted at that. This is the same old shtick companies trot out every time they want to do something egregiously anti-consumer--or in this case, anti-creator. That there are apparently still people that this routine works on is a touch depressing, but at least the judge wasn't one of them.
Good. This is one step to stop the future from looking like that Internet Archive thing they did for their 25th anniversary: <a href="https://wayforward.archive.org/ia2046/" rel="nofollow">https://wayforward.archive.org/ia2046/</a>.
Right decision for the wrong reasons? I think the bidding wars hurt the vast majority of authors, where all the money and energy and physical product space in bookshops gets sucked into a handful of authors leaving the majority of respected, award winning and decent selling authors begging for scraps during their lunch break at their day job. But I don't a merger would have helped at all.
Penguin Random House?<p>They mean Bertelsmann
<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertelsmann" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertelsmann</a>
Oh man remember when Meta / Facebook was a monopoly and we had to do everything in our power to stop them? And now their stock is down 75% in the last 12 months and they are getting beaten up by competitors? And without any government intervention! It's almost like the world is always dynamic and who is on top today isn't on top tomorrow...