Penguin and Random House set to merge?
You will no doubt have read in the news this week that two of the biggest traditional publishers out there – Penguin and Random House – are involved in merger talks. At the moment, Random House is the biggest publisher in the UK, while the Pearson Group’s Penguin is the third largest. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if the merger goes ahead, the resulting company will be pretty sizeable.
One of the main reasons for the proposed merger that have been discussed in the press is the fact that now organisations such as Amazon are so big, the publishers need to do something in order to stand up and compete with them. The idea is that they would have more clout when representing authors, although some worry that fewer publishing companies – no matter the size of the remaining ones – means that there will be fewer options available for authors looking to get published.
There is no agreement yet in the talks between the two publishers, but it is thought that if they do reach a deal, there might be issues for the competition regulators to look at because of the size of the market share the merged business would hold.
In some ways, it’s understandable that two of the biggest UK publishers are looking for ways to stand up to the large companies such as Amazon, especially when we consider the fact that Amazon significantly dominates the e-book retail market without too much competition. However, the traditional publishing industry is hardly awash with competition itself – merging to create one even bigger publishing company hardly seems likely to make a positive impact on that front.
It seems that in the never-ending quest to offer a good deal to readers while still providing good, solid opportunities for writers, there are still many questions to be answered. The Penguin-Random House merger might go some way to solving some of those questions, but there’s a chance it could well leave some other answers a little bit wanting.
You can read more about the merger talks here. And in the meantime, what do you think about the potential deal?
