US book publishing in the 60's and 70's was a forrest of small and medium firms focused mostly on, duh, books. Some were profitable, some muddled along, some folded...pretty much as normal in any varied competitive market. BERTELSMANN didn't drop a half billion in 80's money Doubleday because Doubleday was sinking. It was a prosperous company with a valuable brand and customer base. So were Bantam, ACE, Pyramid and most of the other pre-invasion publishers. And there were thousands of bookstores doing fine even after the emergence of the mall chains.
In pursuit of "synergies" and "efficiency" the corporate beancounters consolidated that healthy competitive environment into a fossilized oligopoly utterly dependent on a handful of channels to shovel out product. They outsourced all the core functions that used to distinguish their precursors. First level content evaluation? Outsourced to agents. Printing? Outsourced to China? Distribution? Outsourced to Ingram, Baker&Taylor, Barnes&Noble, Amazon...
Editing? Downized and contracted out.
All they have left inhouse is dealmaking and financial services.
They have more in common with the Wall Street moneychangers than the book people that founded and built up the imprints they've devalued to nothing. Except the Wall Street gang wouldn't be caught dead on the same side of the street. They at least know how to run a scam without telling the feds it's coming.
Here's a video to check out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGds6GdM7C8
The introduction of the new, unified Randy Penguin Logo.
Notice all the independent publishers they ate up and compare the sea of lost quirky logos, representative of each brand's personality, all now replaced by... utter blandness...
The war was lost long ago. We're just now entering the body count phase...
Oh, here we go, another case of previously undiscovered synergy:
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/ha...les-teams.html
Quote:
Hachette UK is to create a new sales structure, merging the teams of Little, Brown and Orion, and Hodder & Stoughton, Headline, Hachette Children’s Books and Quercus.
The restructure means Dallas Manderson, sales director at Orion, will leave the company to “pursue other interests”, while Jane Harris, executive director sales and marketing at Quercus, will also leave. Hachette said a “small number of roles in sales are now at risk of redundancy”, as a result of the sales team mergers.
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What the heck, books is books. You don't need five teams for five imprints...
More consolidations to come, they're too far gone to stop now...