Quote:
Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks
I don't follow the Baen boards like I used to, but I suspect that Baen will be gobbled up by a larger publisher within a couple of years.
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I think it's idiotic that the world is globalizing to such extremes that in some industries, the entire world is basically dependent on one or two companies. In IT, it's Microsoft/Apple for OS's, Intel/AMD for desktop/laptop CPU's, NVidia/AMD(ATI) for dedicated graphics cards.
Publishers are also moving in that direction, with subsidiaries, sub-subsidiaries and even sub-sub-subsidiaries. As if that is not enough, huge publishers are merging (Random House / Penguin), or bought by even bigger companies (HarperCollins is part of News Corp).
Take a look at the gigantic number of imprints HarperCollins has. Most of these imprints were publishers, way back when.
Random House is even worse.
Penguin is comparable to HarperCollins.
Now Penguin and Random House have merged into Penguin RandomHouse... to form a publisher of mammoth proportions. I shudder to think that it is possible that PRH merges with Simon&Shuster and/or HarperCollins.
In the end, I think it would be possible to be left with only two publishers; one giant company that is basically a merger of all of the Big Six (now 5), and the other is Amazon; and the rest fights over 1-2% of the market.