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Originally Posted by fjtorres
It has *everything* to do with the fact that a least a quarter of the consumer book market is moving to digital distribution.... The result is excess pbook capacity.
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The companies don't need to merge in order to cut back on paper book costs.
Or, to put it another way: Executives aren't going to risk losing control of a company and/or their jobs to hide the costs of closing a few printing facilities and warehouses.
Not to mention that some publishers have already outsourced book manufacturing. Random House, for example, is the largest publisher in the world, and only has 5,300 employees. Obviously they've automated and/or outsourced a lot of book production.
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Originally Posted by fjtorres
....the exit strategy is clear: merge and spinoff, preferably with an IPO if you can find takers for the stock.
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We're talking about the publishers, not Barnes & Noble.
News already decided to split its business into publishing (news, books, magazines) and broadcast/media (BSkyB, Fox News, the movie studio etc) back in June. It's highly unlikely they will split off the book publishers any time soon.