[fjtorres]

I don't think this has *anything* to do with economic philosophies of any stripe.
(It isn't even particularly greedy of them.)

It has *everything* to do with the fact that a least a quarter of the consumer book market is moving to digital distribution, thereby undercutting the economies of scale of the batch-print model. Worse, the majority of that 25% of the consumer market moving to digital is the part consumed by avid readers and the 75% that is staying with print is mostly composed of casual readers and occasional buyers. Less sales and less predictable ones. (Not that consumer pbook sales have ever been terribly predictable in the BPH world.)

The result is excess pbook capacity so, barring bailouts from idiot politicians the BPHs *have* to consolidate pbook market share to maintain facility utilization rates, or rework their workflows and internal processes to maintain pbook profitability at lower print run levels. There are signs they are doing both (HarperCollins, for example, recently announced they would be closing their last warehouses in the US and would be outsourcing the storage of unsold books to a third party).

The plain reality is that the consumer market for pbooks is shrinking (less than the growth of ebooks, mind you, so profitability is holding up in the short term) and will continue to shrink in the long term. Now, your typical multinational is *not* going to bleed to death in the name of protecting "culture" regardless of anybody's economic religion. Instead, they'll get out while the getting is good.
Which they are; the exit strategy is clear: merge and spinoff, preferably with an IPO if you can find takers for the stock.
And in the confusion of the merger they'll shed all the excess capacity, aka, dead wood.