PRH CEO Markus Dohle Stepping Down, End of Year

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From Publishing Perspectives:

Emphasizing that the news from Gütersloh and New York City arrives “on the best of mutual terms,” Germany’s Bertelsmann has announced today (December 9) that Markus Dohle is stepping down as worldwide CEO of Penguin Random House and as a member of Bertelsmann’s executive board. It’s being made clear that this is Dohle’s decision and that Bertelsmann regrets it.

The news will surprise many in world publishing. Dohle, 54, has come to be seen as perhaps the industry’s most energetic and expressive public advocate in the executive ranks. He refers to this himself today, referring to his “enthusiasm and passion.”

NPD Books’ Kristen McLean, familiar for her analysis to our Publishing Perspectives readers, confirms to Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter at The New York Times that this is hardly a convenient moment for Dohle to feel he must make this move. “There are unknowns at every level,” McLean says. “There are unknowns with consumer behavior, unknowns with what retailers are doing, and unknowns at the publisher level about what to invest in right now.”

Dohle’s role in the leadership of the largest trade publishing company–”a community of 325 imprints,” as he calls it, spanning many countries–has given his messages immediate attention. He has taken this seriously. He’s an outsized and welcoming personality, big enough to embrace the sheer expanse of PRH. He has leveraged his position as a bully pulpit to project an upbeat, boisterous can-do tone during some of contemporary publishing’s most sophisticated challenges.

Dohle was appointed the first CEO to lead the world’s largest trade book publishing company on July 1, 2013, when the publishing group was founded. He had become CEO of Random House in 2008.

Nihar Malaviya, currently a PRH vice-president and director of strategy and operations, is to become interim CEO at the start of the new year.

. . . .

Dohle has been outspoken about the crucial need for the freedom to publish and about book publishing’s place in the world’s democratic order, particularly in the current era of authoritarian dynamics. Demonstrating the kind of personal commitment to his work that’s one of his trademarks, he personally seeded the US$500,000 Dohle Book Defense Fund with PEN America in February amid myriad book-banning attempts in the States and in other world markets.

In October 2021, Dohle had opened Frankfurter Buchmesse’s new Frankfurt Studio facility in a live hour-long conversation with Publishing Perspectives. During our discussion, he talked about the profound value he sees in immersive, long-form reading.

“It helps you to actually see the world from other points of view,” he said, “and we know it creates empathy and human values, especially in young people. That’s what the world needs right now if we want to help defend our democracy, based on human values.”

. . . .

Professional industry attendees at this year’s 12th Sharjah Publishers Conference in the United Arab Emirates could see clearly Dohle’s bitter disappointment on November 1, the morning after Judge Florence Yu Pan’s order was made public.

Dohle, going through with a scheduled appearance at the conference, told Bodour Al Qasimi, president of the International Publishers Association‘s (IPA) onstage, that the court’s decision was “utterly wrong.” If the S&S acquisition had not been blocked by the Biden administration’s Justice Department, “Readers would have benefited from this merger because we sell our books through more retailers than anybody else in 20,000 retail locations in the US, 160,000 retail locations globally.

“Authors would have been benefiting because of more royalties, because of more sales, and their agents [would benefit], of course, too,” he said. “And ultimately, because of our synergies, we would have paid more taxes, so the taxpayer would have been benefiting. So it was good for our constituencies. And, by the way, we’ve lost some market share. So Simon & Schuster is basically refilling lost market share for us. And after the merger, we would have been less than 20 percent of the United States’ trade [book publishing] market, less than 20 percent—while Amazon is 50 percent of the retail side.”

“I am biased,” Dohle said onstage, “and I’m very disappointed.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

PG says there is definitely a story behind this story.

Too much happy talk is the principal reason for PG’s suspicions.

As PG has opined before, he can’t imagine that PRH outside counsel having not waved a big red flag, telling their client that the acquisition would attract a great deal of antitrust attention and a legal challenge would be likely.

From Wikipedia:

Hubris (/ˈhjuːbrɪs/; from Ancient Greek ὕβρις (húbris) ‘pride, insolence, outrage’), or less frequently hybris (/ˈhaɪbrɪs/),describes a personality quality of extreme or excessive pride or dangerous overconfidence, often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance. The term arrogance comes from the Latin adrogare, meaning “to feel that one has a right to demand certain attitudes and behaviors from other people”. To arrogate means “to claim or seize without justification… To make undue claims to having”, or “to claim or seize without right… to ascribe or attribute without reason”. The term pretension is also associated with the term hubris, but is not synonymous with it.

According to studies, hubris, arrogance, and pretension are related to the need for victory (even if it does not always mean winning) instead of reconciliation, which “friendly” groups might promote. Hubris is usually perceived as a characteristic of an individual rather than a group, although the group the offender belongs to may suffer collateral consequences from wrongful acts. Hubris often indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one’s own competence, accomplishments, or capabilities. The adjectival form of the noun hubris/hybris is hubristic/hybristic.

The term hubris originated in Ancient Greek, where it had several different meanings depending on the context. In legal usage, it meant assault or sexual crimes and theft of public property, and in religious usage it meant transgression against a god.

. . . .

In its modern usage, hubris denotes overconfident pride combined with arrogance. Hubris is often associated with a lack of humility. Sometimes a person’s hubris is also associated with ignorance. The accusation of hubris often implies that suffering or punishment will follow, similar to the occasional pairing of hubris and nemesis in Greek mythology. The proverb “pride goeth (goes) before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall” (from the biblical Book of Proverbs, 16:18) is thought to sum up the modern use of hubris. Hubris is also referred to as “pride that blinds” because it often causes a committer of hubris to act in foolish ways that belie common sense. In other words, the modern definition may be thought of as, “that pride that goes just before the fall.” (annotations in the original omitted)

Link to the rest at Wikipedia

2 thoughts on “PRH CEO Markus Dohle Stepping Down, End of Year”

  1. And, by the way, we’ve lost some market share. So Simon & Schuster is basically refilling lost market share for us. And after the merger, we would have been less than 20 percent of the United States’ trade [book publishing] market, less than 20 percent—while Amazon is 50 percent of the retail side.

    One moment, please, while I pick my jaw up off the floor (which is particularly unpleasant after spending yesterday afternoon in a dentist’s chair, wondering whether I should watch Little Shop of Horrors or Marathon Man to unwind).

    Amazon-published materials are not “50 percent of the retail side.” No, Amazon is stepping into the place of other pipelines from publisher to reader — especially, but not only, brick-and-mortar retail bookstores and general-merchandise stores like Target and Walmart. But according to PRH’s own statistics as presented at trial, Amazon-published materials are not a significant competitor, let alone with the “high-advance” books that you count on to make your money. (Some of us took or have access to notes from certain industry presentations you, or your minions, have made.)

    As I’ve remarked before, the net as a commercial publisher is actually higher when Amazon’s negotiating power pushes a commercial publisher’s books a little bit into "deep discount" territory (this isn’t news, ponder the date on that blawg entry).

    Before publishers’ officers make pronouncements proclaiming long chains of cause-and-effect that support the position that just coincidentally happens to personally favor them, I suggest a trip to The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is edited by highly qualified gatekeepers of culture (who have no known conflicts of interest, and in fact have substantial subject-matter expertise) in furtherance of all of the good things about ‘murika. Just like commercial publishers claim to do… sort of (actual expertise and avoiding conflicts of interest are seldom proclaimed, for good reason).

  2. As a side note, one wonders if Mr. Dohle would be enthused about long-form reading that would inculcate values that are different from his.

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