Inside Book Publishing’s Merger Mania – and Why Antitrust Laws Won’t Slow It Down
“A lot of the talk and the fear and the anger is about things that are none of the business of the law,” one merger expert says Move over, Hollywood. Merger mania has come for the book publishing industry. On the tail of massive acquisitions in the entertainment and media space, such as AT&T’s $85 billion purchase of Time Warner in 2018, thew 2019 re-merger of ViacomCBS and Disney’s $71 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox in 2019, major book publishers are embarking on their own consolidations in an effort to cement their place in an increasingly competitive environment. But are any of these major acquisitions anti-competitive, as critics have argued? On Monday, News Corp. completed a $349 million acquisition Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s books and media division, adding titles like J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and popular children’s books like “Curious George” and “The Little Prince” to News Corp.’s HarperCollins. The acquisition came four months after Penguin Random House said it would purchase Simon & Schuster for $2.18 billion from ViacomCBS, sending shockwaves through the book publishing world about the prospect of two of the industry’s biggest publishers coming together that would change the moniker for the top...
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