Judge Florence Y. Pan ruled today that the acquisition of Simon & Schuster by Penguin Random House could not go forward. The ruling was explicitly to protect the “competition” for the “anticipated top-selling books”. In other words, the big books by big authors for which only the Big Five can compete regularly (with occasional bids […]
The end of the general trade publishing concept
My brilliant friend Joe Esposito has written a piece to explain why Penguin Random House would want to acquire Simon & Schuster. I have also been thinking about why PRH, or any of the other three of the “Big Five”, would want to acquire S&S. In fact, two of the three, Hachette and HarperCollins, have […]
Getting an award and getting caught up with innovation with BISG
The Book Industry Study Group, or BISG, is a book publishing trade organization now headed by Brian O’Leary that was formed to be pan-industry. They were preceded by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the American Booksellers Association (ABA), but those were two “sides” of the book trade with their own interests, and they […]
The publishing world is changing, but there is one big dog that has not yet barked
Recent data seem to show that, for the publishers, the growth in the retail ebook market has slowed down or stopped (at least for the moment), while Amazon’s ebook sales apparently continue to grow. The share of the market controlled by the publishing establishment — the Big Five publishers and others — is starting to be […]
Publisher strategies around first serials pretty obviously need to be rethought
This Friday, newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic — the Wall Street Journal in the US and the Guardian in the UK — will publish the first chapter of the much-awaited Harper Lee novel, “Go Set A Watchman”. The licensors who authorized these excerpts are HarperCollins in the US (and they are, of course, […]