![]() ![]() PRH’s CEO Markus Dohle said that the imprints of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster would still be permitted to bid against each other. ![]() PRH, the bigger house, said it would not reduce the number of titles acquired or the amounts paid for book deals after the merger. ![]() The publishers also said that the bidding wars the government had talked about were not common between them. The proposed merger would have reduced competition, decreased author compensation, diminished the breadth, depth, and diversity of our stories and ideas, and ultimately impoverished our democracy.”Īs reported by The Guardian, PRH and Simon & Schuster claimed that their merger would increase what authors are paid, as they would be able to save more and thus spend more on books. For this, it cited blockbusters for which the two companies had bid as rivals, and claimed that the bidding war drove up the author’s eventual advance.Īfter the verdict, Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division was quoted by AP as saying that it “protects vital competition for books and is a victory for authors, readers, and the free exchange of ideas. The Justice department’s basic argument was that the merged company would dominate the market for books with author advances of $250,000 and higher so completely that the amount authors are paid, as well as the number of titles released, would fall. PRH publishes novelists like Zadie Smith, Danielle Steele, Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, Toni Morrison, John Grisham, Dan Brown, etc., while Simon & Schuster has Stephen King, Bob Woodward, Colleen Hoover, Jennifer Weiner, Hillary Clinton, among others. The merger of PRH and Simon & Schuster would have put them in a position where they could corner the most lucrative deals while paying a smaller amount to authors, the US government and author bodies had argued. Penguin is owned by German media group Bertelsmann while US firm Paramount Global owns Simon & Schuster. The US publishing industry is dominated by the Big Five – Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan, which make up 90 per cent of the market for top-selling books. Here are the key issues in the trial, what the government argued, what the publishers claimed, and what King and other authors have said. Penguin has announced that it will appeal the federal court decision. ![]()
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