Previously, I’ve talked about other publishing scandals in this blog. Such as the Webnovel incident with them sending out pamphlets to their writers discouraging them from criticizing the Chinese Government or talking about political events. I’ve talked about why I feel self-publishing is an important thing as well. Recently, The New York Times has reported that The Biden Administration is rejecting a $2.18 Billion dollar merger between Random House and Simon & Schuster. The argument is that such a merger would affect author advances making them lower, and make it so that the company making the acquisition has more control over the industry as a whole. “If the world’s largest book publisher is permitted to acquire one of its biggest rivals, it will have unprecedented control over this important industry,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement accompanying the lawsuit. “American authors and consumers will pay the price of this anticompetitive merger — lower advances for authors and ultimately fewer books and less variety for consumers.”
You can read the full article from The New York Times here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/books/penguin-random-house-simon-schuster-merger-lawsuit.html
