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The Authors Guild on Penguin & Random House Merger

The Authors Guild released a letter on their website, giving a delayed response (offices were down due to Hurricane Sandy last week,) to the Penguin and Random House “super-merger.” This is the letter posted by Scott Turow, Nov. 5, 2012.

Scott Turow on Penguin Random House

Posted November 5, 2012

We’re back in business: power kicked in for our office Saturday morning; our email server came online late that night.

Here’s our storm-delayed member alert on last Monday’s unsettling announcement that Random House and Penguin, the two largest trade book publishers in the U.S., are merging.

Although Random House has said that the combination would control 25% of the book market, that appears to significantly understate things. The companies’ share of the U.S. trade book market for fiction and narrative non-fiction likely exceeds 35%. Their share in certain submarkets is no doubt even higher. The merger merits close scrutiny from antitrust officials at the Justice Department or the FTC.

While the companies discuss the cost savings from this merger through consolidating warehousing and other operations, those potential efficiencies for such large publishers are probably minor.  Economies of scale only go so far. The business logic of creating Penguin Random House would appear to have much more to do with the ongoing restructuring of the book industry. Barnes & Noble is now the sole brick-and-mortar giant; Amazon’s hold on online bookselling is more solid than ever.

“Survival of the largest appears to be the message here,” said Scott Turow, Authors Guild president. “Penguin Random House, our first mega-publisher, would have additional negotiating leverage with the bookselling giants, but that leverage would come at a high cost for the literary market and therefore for readers. There are already far too few publishers willing to invest in nonfiction authors, who may require years to research and write histories, biographies, and other works, and in novelists, who may need the help of a substantial publisher to effectively market their books to readers.”

We’ll keep you updated on developments in this matter.

Please bear with us as we sort through last week’s email.

To view The Authors Guild website click here.

 

Famous Author Memorabilia up for Auction

Profiles in History has announced the items of famous author memorabilia that will be included in their December 18 auction.

The auction will take place in Los Angeles, and include 300 of the most important manuscripts in their collection.

The entire collection has over 3,000 items, and is expected to be sold over the next two years.

Profiles in History is the world’s largest auctioneer and dealer of original Hollywood Memorabilia, historical autographs, letters, documents, vintage signed photographs and manuscripts.

Here are some of the great things they have for auction:

Mark Twain

Charles Dickens

L. Frank Baum

F. Scott Fitzgerald

A lock of Edgar Allan Poe’s Hair

First Folio Edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet