There's a piece in the New York Times here about the basic cultural and industry forces at work in the Random House-Penguin merger that while I haven't read it yet sort of has to be worthwhile at least as a representation of a certain and likely traditionalist point of view.
My friend Gil Roth in pointing it out on Facebook says that the early shot the piece takes at Amazon.com may reflect a certain bias from which the article may never recover, so I will warn you similarly.
I think the prose publishing industry has a lot of the same problems as the newspaper industry in that massive, paradigm-shifting contraction is even more excruciatingly painful than usual given how those companies operate, so a lot of what can be seen as difficulties and disruptions from a paradigm shift in business realities are actually just a grind of competing forces within those companies, if that makes sense.
My friend Gil Roth in pointing it out on Facebook says that the early shot the piece takes at Amazon.com may reflect a certain bias from which the article may never recover, so I will warn you similarly.
I think the prose publishing industry has a lot of the same problems as the newspaper industry in that massive, paradigm-shifting contraction is even more excruciatingly painful than usual given how those companies operate, so a lot of what can be seen as difficulties and disruptions from a paradigm shift in business realities are actually just a grind of competing forces within those companies, if that makes sense.