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Now Do Amazon

Consolidation in book publishing is a trivial issue compared with the dominance of the Everything Store.
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One of the great literary hoaxes of our time is the book spine. A staggering number of logos stare out from dust jackets, celebrating names including Crown, Vintage, Ballantine, Knopf, and Dial. But the pluralism implied by this diversity of monikers is a sham. In the U.S., nearly 100 of them belong to a single company: Penguin Random House. The rest are owned by a small handful of competitors, one of which is Simon & Schuster.

At the end of 2020, PRH, the result of a 2013 merger between Penguin and Random House, announced its

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