Puck: The Billion-Dollar Book Deal of the Century
June 29, 2022
In November 2020, Penguin Random House announced its US$2.175 billion acquisition of Simon & Schuster, which has since been met with antitrust claims made by the US Department of Justice and trial set to start on August 1. The DOJ “wants to protect the most successful authors, those with sophisticated agents and the most lucrative book contracts,” said O’Melveny’s Dan Petrocelli, who represents Penguin. He claims that the DOJ “invents a market” to publish “anticipated top-selling books” that excludes the vast majority of authors “and lacks any basis in either the real world or accepted market-definition analysis.”
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