It is no surprise that the public remarks at Frankfurt by Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle and Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy contain gems worth pondering. Book publishing has been fortunate to have really smart people leading the biggest companies during our period of digital transition. The apparent collusion over the implementation of […]
The big global publishers are integrating across both territories and languages
Since I posted this two days ago, one of the Big Five CEOs pointed out some things I missed that are important. These are addressed in a post-script at the bottom. Subscribers to the blog would have received the original post without the “correction”. My apologies. The announcement this week that John Sargent has apparently […]
It is not news to publishers that they have to engage directly with their readers
Since the merger that has created Penguin Random House, there has been precious little speculation (except by me, as far as I can tell) about what this new behemoth in trade book publishing could do to exploit their scale in new and innovative ways. Their scale advantage is huge. PRH has something in the neighborhood […]
Auletta’s New Yorker piece is good orientation for thinking about the DoJ case
Writing about the lawsuit the DoJ has instituted against Apple and five leading publishers is very hard. It’s a big issue and doing it justice requires navigating two very large and complex bodies of knowledge: anti-trust law and the trade book publishing business. Whenever I write about it, I feel handicapped because I don’t know […]
There’s no level playing field without agency pricing, and not in the way you think
In the 1990s, Bernie Rath was the head of the American Booksellers Association. (Bernie was not a popular man across the industry. Lawsuits about trading practices that troubled publishers really began with him.) He pushed the idea that publishers should stop printing prices on the books. Bernie’s logic was very simple. He pointed out that […]