Justice sues to block Penguin Random House’s acquisition of Simon and Schuster | Hacker News Reader

Justice sues to block Penguin Random House’s acquisition of Simon and Schuster

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115 pointspseudolus34 comments

I am all for this. IMO publishers especially textbook publishers are running a racket on us. Giving one company even more control over the market is definitely not going to help the situation.

They mention with the acquisition Penguin would "control of close to half the market for acquiring publishing rights to anticipated top-selling books". They also mention how the market is dominated by 5 major players already. Is this domination due to the major 5 players being able to pay substantially more to acquire publishing rights than the little guys or is something else at play?

[I have a close family member that works in publishing]

As far as I can tell, part of it is that the bigger publishing houses are able to get lucky more often; they're more likely to get a bestseller than a smaller publishing house. This is apparently due to a combination of

1. Being able to pay more authors as a raw number (they're numerically more likely to get a "hit"), which is partly because of

2. Inertia from already having big authors, so people look to sign with them before considering the smaller publishers.

Note that this is really only for mass-market stuff; specialty genres are different.

The big publishers are also able to cut better deals with distribution centers and booksellers.

Thank you very much for your reply. Its always good to hear from inside the industry. The two points make complete sense. I can definitely see an author wanting to stick with a publisher that has made them money in the past.

Not to mention:

Advances. No not for the big celebrity writers doing memoirs/biographies. Those are already out of the realm of imagination for indies.

It’s the advances given to up-and-comers out of the MFAs, and the advances given to professors teaching at said programs. An indie book house will not be able to front 100k to an author for a book in the way the big 4 does (funded in part by the celebrity books they sell).

I'm still a bit lost as to why this and the music industry haven't been more disrupted by technology. You don't need a record label you don't need a book publisher, you can, if people want to consume your content just write your book and have people just send you money via patreon or one time donations.

I've made music with friends for a long time, and the industry makes it very hard for any independent artist to get ahead. You have some of the worst deals ever imaginable given to these kids, who are often only 18 or 19 and the label just takes everything.

Why do we need any of that, I go out of my way to buy music exclusively from independent artist, while I might stream some popular hit. When it comes to actually buying merchandise, or music I only give it to the Indies.

It's in part because advertising still drives visibility which drives sales, and all the main discovery mediums are centralized and sell ad placements to the highest bidder. Combine that with the typical algorithmic promotion algorithm, where Amazon etc want to show you things they think you're likely to buy, so they mostly sell you things that are already top sellers.

The publishing industry was disrupted by technology in 2007 when Amazon released the Kindle. It took a few years, but for a while, independent book authors were rivalling the "Big Five" publishers in terms of both sales volume and books sold.

Part of this was driven by the big publishers' response to indies: they raised the price of their own eBooks to protect their hardcover market. They even illegally colluded with each other, along with Apple, to force these higher prices across the industry.

But they were sued and lost, and the result was a lowering of big publisher eBook prices across the board. On the independent side, the problem was that too many people were publishing too many books. It was impossible to keep up, and there was no good system for finding the "best" independent authors, since tastes are so subjective and the vast majority of independent authors didn't have any money to spend on marketing anyway.

So that leads us to today, where the "Big Four" (trying to become the Big Three) still have access to their promotional machinery, which includes retail bookstores. There are a very few insanely successful independent authors, and a veeeeeery long tail of folks that have no way of getting noticed in the crowd.

Still, the sales volume of traditional publishing and independent publishing remains about equivalent even today (it's hard to get exact numbers because Amazon doesn't like giving them out, but apps like KindleSpy offer a broad estimate) It's just that the latter is spread out among many more authors.

> and the result was a lowering of big publisher eBook prices across the board

Did it? I must have missed that bit. As far as I can tell, the only result of the case against the publishers & Apple has been government enforced Amazon control of the ebook market.

It was normal, for a time, for eBooks to be more expensive than their physical counterparts. A "convenience fee", if you like.

Whilst that can still happen, it is no longer the _norm_.

> You don't need a record label you don't need a book publisher, you can, if people want to consume your content just write your book and have people just send you money via patreon or one time donations.

Yes you do need the biggest possible label. All the big artists today (post 2000), they might have started building their audience on the internet organically , but at some point one absolutely needs a label that has all the connections, budget for advertising, touring, featuring, ...to grow as an artist, nothing has changed on that regard. What collapsed is the record industry, which virtually doesn't exist anymore, save from vinyl records maybe.

The people that are useless on the other hand are the middlemen like Spotify and co, they serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever. Better distribute your music freely on Youtube instead and grow your audience there, or do live shows on Twitch.

This is a technologist forum, but people here needs to remember that just because you have a product to sell doesn't mean it will sell, no matter how good that product is, you often need to hire people dedicated to selling that product to clients. Music is no different.

Tech N9ne doesn't have a label. Most of the music I listen to is independently released.

I actually enjoy supporting artist directly vs having a label steal half of what they make.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_N9ne

According to wikipedia, Tech N9ne has been on many labels before, including majors such as Warner Bros. What is your exemple supposed to demonstrate? At some point, during his career, this artist benefited from being on a major label.

He got dropped though. Meaning that you really don't need a label to succeed.

Many artists do better after going indee.

> He got dropped though. Meaning that you really don't need a label to succeed.

And? It doesn't change the fact that he did get exposure thanks to a major label at some point. You have proven nothing, on the contrary. You have demonstrated my entire point. Nobody makes featuring with Eminem or Lil Wayne without being backed by a label. Featurings are never free.

I beg to differ, he had no success at all while on a label.

Most artists who get dropped are never heard from again. Even if he did have a deal at some point it's not the reason he's successful. I'd argue in Tech's case he's just absurdly more skilled than the vast majority of other artists.

If you need an example of artists who do well but have never been signed to a major take ICP.

> I beg to differ, he had no success at all while on a label.

Looking at his Wikipedia page quickly, this is an entirely false statement.

There may be some people that succeed without ever being on any label, but he is not one of them.

I'll accept being wrong here.

I hope we get to a point where artists can serve fans directly, but that might be a long ways off.

All of my friends that are truly veracious readers prefer physical books. I've wasted a good bit of money gifting kindles.

Vinyl has some hold outs, but after music went digital on CDs the next step to digital distribution was inevitable since ultimately music listening is an interaction that is for your ears.

Many readers prefer turning pages on top of the visual experience for some reason, which I'm sure has been an impediment for bypassing publishers

Vinyl doesn't merely have holdouts, but it's actually outselling CDs, now. (Granted, all physical media remains a tiny fraction of the recorded music market.)

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/14/vinyl-records-...

I figure this is mostly the trendy bandwagon at work, but from those I know who partake in such, having a highly visible piece of cover art is another motivating factor behind its resurgence.

I read all my books on my iPhone. Who needs a kindle? I used to have a massive library of books. But now in NZ, ebooks are a dream, as print edition prices are a nightmare

That's really interesting... where do most of the books in NZ come from? The US has relatively low prices for print books (sometimes cheaper than eBook equivalents), but that might be a quirk of the US market.

> All of my friends that are truly veracious readers prefer physical books. I've wasted a good bit of money gifting kindles.

Interesting. I'm a voracious reader (several novels every week), and while I suppose reading a paper book is a bit nicer on average, there is really no substitute for being able to tote around hundreds of books (both read and unread) in an ereader.

There are certainly exceptions. Graphic novels and large format art books don't work too well as ebooks. Poetry can benefit from being typeset in a fixed format (line-wrap weirdness is jarring). But anything that is mostly prose that I'd otherwise be reading as a mass-market paperback might as well be an ebook instead.

There are too many books and too many songs. The problem is no longer accessing them, it is finding them in the first place. Generally they need marketing to be discovered. This is where big name publishers come in.

If you find a way to disrupt the recommendation industry you will be ahead of even Google.

I was thinking about this conundrum a bit during my MFA when I met Wesley Stace and he mentioned something about there being a stigma against self-publishing literature that doesn't exist for self-releasing music. I think part of it is barrier to entry. Any schmuck with access to a computer with a word processor could write something that looks like a book and put it on Smashwords, etc. and claim to have published something.

For music, it gets a lot harder: There's a higher cost to being able to get an MP3 available on the music services, not just on the part of the middle men who will gladly take your money to put things up (it's been a while since I've been in the music game so I don't know how big a role these folks play nowadays), but also just for the act of recording which requires the non-trivial purchase or rental of recording equipment, not to mention the training to be able to produce something that's not embarrassing (although the latter has not stopped more than a few people from releasing stuff like that anyway). Most people think they could write a book ("if they only had the time") but few people think they could record a song.

But regardless, there's still the challenge of getting music heard, and I suspect that from minimum 500-CD orders of indie albums from the CD era, the majority are sitting in boxes in people's basements, garages and attics.

There were many more musicians able to make a middle class income from their work back then. The publishers were famously awful, but the industry as a whole was more accessible if you wanted to do it full time

This is a cynical take and I’m no expert but perhaps the publishing industry can’t afford the legal fortress needed for effective protection from anti-trust enforcement?

I mean there seem to be plenty of enormous mergers and acquisitions that aren’t and haven’t been blocked over the past several decades.

Yes, I was thinking "when was the last time Amazon had an acquisition blocked? “

What could Amazon acquire to double its market share in any particular market?

Wal-mart?

I once signed a contract to write a textbook. The publishers were so busy swallowing up each other I had a clause added: if the house sold, I would be able to move to another publisher and keep my advance, and one year later, I did

Instead of going after google, microsoft, or even citadel they go after publishing companies. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Apart from the anti-trust angles as to why such a merger is bad, I am also concerned about the increasing political biases among employees in the publishing world. For example, employees at Penguin Random House protested the publishing of Jordan Peterson’s new book (https://reason.com/2020/11/25/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-l...). Simon and Schuster employees protested the publishing of Mike Pence’s memoir (https://thehill.com/homenews/media/549311-simon-schuster-rej...). There are numerous other examples that can be found via search, and the spike in political protests at publishers coincides with the rise of protests and calls for deplatforming elsewhere.

Something similar has been happening with booksellers as well. Industry groups like the American Booksellers Association have been bowing down to progressive activists’ pressure (https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-entertainment-business-...). Leftist activists have pressured physical bookstores to remove books from their shelves (https://reason.com/2021/01/11/powells-books-antifa-andy-ngo-...). Even new online independent bookstore Bookshop.org has joined the culture wars, asking customers to donate to send copies of “The 1619 Project” to schools (https://bookshop.org/1619).

Books are a really fundamental tool in our society for the exchange of information and ideas. The introduction of political and ideological wars into the world of book publishing and sales is scary, and out of touch with classically liberal enlightenment values. However, seeing as how many institutions have been taken over or caved to such pressures, I feel like choice and competition are the one thing protecting free expression on this medium. As such, I would not like to see the type of consolidation these publishers are pushing for.

> The introduction of political and ideological wars into the world of book publishing and sales is scary, and out of touch with classically liberal enlightenment values.

You think the presence of political and ideological wars in book publishing is new?

I am not sure. It feels new to me. I think the level of coordination and organization by fringe activists is likely greater today than ever before thanks to the Internet. I also think that there has been a clear leftward swing in bias in colleges that may be fueling this shift against free exchange of ideas. Is it possible there were biases in the past, potentially in the other direction? Sure. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the level of such pressures is greater today than in the last 100 years. I’m curious if you see it differently or if you have data/evidence saying otherwise.

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