A short, snarky history of Manhattan corporate publishing...
http://www.theweeklings.com/jefishma...-already-lost/
Quote:
In 1986 that now-famous German publishing conglomerate Bertelsmann—of whom, I guarantee, not a soul in America had ever heard before 1986—purchased venerable old publisher Doubleday for nearly half a billion dollars. With that kind of loot kicking around the Nelson Doubleday household, our cultural defenders forgot to contemplate whether this acquisition was good for American letters. Maybe it helped knowing that Bertelsmann had begun life as that most unthreatening of all entities: a Bible publisher.
Anyway, once again, no one asked authors—you know, those originators of the content that makes the book business the book business—what they thought. The only option authors had was to go on writing books and hope it all worked out.
If someone had bothered to ask, maybe an author or two would have scratched his or her head and wondered whether Bertelsmann really needed to make the dramatic changes to the Doubleday business model that it soon implemented.
Before its acquisition Doubleday was a vertically integrated company. They owned printing plants and bookstores and even their own book clubs.
It’s funny to hear industry experts today suggest that the way to defeat Amazon—presuming Amazon needs defeating at all—is for publishers to sell direct to consumers, rather than rely on so-called trade channels of distribution (the now shrinking bookstores) and other brick-and-mortar retail outlets. The reason it’s funny is that when the Germans started shuffling paper at Doubleday, they wanted badly to turn a fresh page. In short, they decided that vertical integration was a dumb idea.
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Lots more snark at the source.