![]() “I’m pretty sure the Department of Justice wouldn’t allow Penguin Random House to buy us, but that’s assuming we still have a Department of Justice,” joked Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp in an email with an author. ![]() It was clear that a new publishing house made of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster would dominate the industry in a way no one had seen before, but few in the industry appeared to believe that then-President Trump’s apparently corporate-friendly Justice Department would actually care enough about the proposed merger to try to interfere.Ī new publishing house would dominate the industry in a way no one had seen before PRH and HarperCollins were indeed the final bidders in the auction, and PRH won the day with a reported bid of $2.2 billion. ![]() When parent company ViacomCBS put Simon & Schuster up for sale in 2020, the smart money was on another one of the major publishers acquiring the house, and the Big Five becoming the Big Four. Penguin Random House is itself the product of many mergers, with one independent publishing imprint after another joining together to form a massive conglomerate, culminating in the merger of Penguin and Random House in 2013 that brought the then-Big Six down to the Big Five. The Big Five control roughly 80 percent of the trade market for books in the US, and Penguin Random House, with a market share of 25 percent in 2020, is the biggest one of all. Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster are two members of what’s called the “Big Five” of publishing, with the other three slots filled by HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan. Perhaps fittingly for a case with such high stakes, the trial, which took place this August, was characterized by obfuscation and downright disinformation nearly the whole way through. In an order published Monday night, the District Court for the District of Columbia found that the proposed merger might “substantially lessen competition,” a decision that should have a massive impact on both the multibillion-dollar book publishing industry and on how the government handles corporate consolidation cases going forward. The government has now officially blocked a proposed merger between book publisher Penguin Random House and rival Simon & Schuster.
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