Penguin Random House

       It's been widely reported but can't go unmentioned: Bertelsmann and Pearson have merged mega-publishers Penguin and Random House into a super-mega-publisher. See, for example, press releases from Penguin and Random House; at GalleyCat Jason Boog has Markus Dohle's letter to Random House employees.
       As so often, I find the 'business' decisions of publishers completely baffling. The bigger-is-better school of publishing apparently still holds sway at the big six-now-five, despite little evidence that this is really working out for them, and for the life of me I can't see the possible benefits consolidation of this sort supposedly offers.
       A fundamental and often overlooked problem: as Levi Asher points out:

A book publisher merger, like a bank merger or a food company merger, is never designed to improve the products the companies sell.

       Surely it's exactly that that publishers should be focusing on (and something that many more nimble small and independent publishers are experimenting with -- often, it seems to me, with some success). But the big publishers seem to have largely lost sight of that -- the idea of improving their products -- a long time ago, preferring to rely on market-muscle (bulking up so that they can convince themselves they're big enough to dictate terms -- except that Amazon has kind of thrown a wrench in that model) and/or marketing hocus-pocus.
       Much has been written about this misbegotten union, and much more will be; for an overview, see, for example, Eric Pfanner and Amy Chozick in The New York Times on Random House and Penguin Merger Creates Global Giant, or Chad Post's post at Three Percent, Bigger than a MegaUltraÜberApocaCane [Random House Penguins].
       Not a good day for publishing; a pretty terrible one for readers and writers.