7 December 2020
When the Department of Justice interviewed me in late 2012 as part of its investigation into the pending merger of Random House and Penguin, I was both surprised and heartened-the very fact that DOJ attorneys were talking with a small publisher suggested that they understood the dark potential of such a deal. After all, the Big Six publishers at the time accounted for roughly 50 percent of American book sales, with the rest of us-independent publishers, university presses, nonprofits-having to follow the rules of the market those few Goliaths dominated. The fact that a merger between Random House (the world's biggest trade publisher) and Penguin (the world's second-biggest trade publisher) would result in a monopoly seemed, to me, obvious.
