From Elysian: In 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon & Schuster. The two publishing houses made up 37 percent and 11 percent of the market share, according to the filing, and combined they would have condensed the Big Five publishing houses into the Big Four. But the government intervened and brought an antitrust … Read more
From Nathan Bransford: Some pretty significant news arrived this week as some of the smartest and most experienced people in publishing are joining forces on a new imprint called Author Equity. Its business model says a lot about where we’re headed as an industry. Essentially, Author Equity pledges to put authors first, and they won’t … Read more
From The Literary Hub: Well, Simon & Schuster is not going to be sold, for now. A federal judge ruled in October that Penguin Random House couldn’t buy the publisher, and since then, Simon & Schuster’s parent company has decided against mounting an appeal. That said, the future of America’s third-largest publisher still remains uncertain. … Read more
From The New York Times: Simon & Schuster, the publishing powerhouse behind best-selling authors like Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin and Judy Blume, is up for sale. Its owner, ViacomCBS, announced Wednesday that, after a “strategic review,” the book publisher was no longer essential to its business and that it would seek a buyer. … Read more
From The Yale Law Journal (footnotes omitted): In Amazon’s early years, a running joke among Wall Street analysts was that CEO Jeff Bezos was building a house of cards. Entering its sixth year in 2000, the company had yet to crack a profit and was mounting millions of dollars in continuous losses, each quarter’s larger than the … Read more