To paraphrase one of the few books that will remain outside their purview: “one publisher to rule them all!”
In a deal announced Wednesday, ViacomCBS will sell Simon & Schuster, the third largest book publisher in the United States, to Penguin Random House, which is already the largest. The price is reportedly $2.18 billion.
Penguin Random House is owned by the German conglomerate Bertelsmann. The deal comes with protections for ViacomCBS in the form of a termination fee should the new “megapublisher” trigger antitrust concerns that stop the sale.
News Corp.’s CEO Robert Thomson is one who suspects it won’t be an easy road for the new company. “It will clearly be a serious antitrust issue,” he said earlier in the month, adding “however cute and clever the structure, if Bertelsmann is a beneficiary, it will be a book behemoth and this will certainly be a profound antitrust issue for the entire book industry and no doubt for authors around the world.”
News Corp., and France’s Vivendi were reportedly in the bidding to purchase the company themselves.
The 96-year-old Simon & Schuster, whose star authors include Stephen King, Bob Woodward, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Mary Higgins Clark, Jerry Seinfeld, and Alice Hoffman also boasts a backlist of 30,000 titles. ViacomCBS, which also owns Paramount studios and Nickelodeon, is betting the health of its company on streaming, according to The New York Times‘s report.
As publishing has contracted in recent years (Penguin and Random House themselves only merged in 2013), there have been rumors of a larger company purchasing Simon & Schuster for some time. But as part of Penguin Random House, it is estimated that one in three books in the United States would ultimately come from the same corporation.
Lit Twitter had some commentary.
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