When the proposed merger between PRH and S&S was first announced in 2020, the prevailing narrative was that a combined PRHS&S would give helpless publishers the leverage they needed to push back against the almighty force of Amazon.

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One of the ironies of this trial, industry magazine Publishers Weekly noted early on, was that “the government’s case relies in part on making publishers look extraordinarily savvy about the market in which they operate, in addition to benefiting from their sheer size.” For publishers to rebut that case, they in turn had to present themselves as essentially incompetent gamblers, risking the company’s money in an industry no one could predict, all for the sheer love of literature.

“Everything is random in publishing,” Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle told the court during his testimony. “Success is random. Bestsellers are random. That is why we are the Random House!” He went on to describe the editors and publishers of PRH as “angel investors in our authors and their dreams, their stories.”

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Both depictions of publishing on display at this trial, as Publishers Weekly acknowledged, have an element of truth. The book market really is notoriously unpredictable, and book publishers really are fairly savvy about manipulating that market in order to insure their own profits. That’s how publishing CEOs traditionally justify their enormous salaries: They are supposed to be the people who understand how to make money out of an irrational business.

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It suits publishers to describe their industry as illogical, quirky, or romantic. Such a depiction of publishing gives cover to the status quo, in which the industry is 76 percent white and 95 percent of books published between 1950 and 2018 were written by white people. If publishing isn’t really a business, but an investment in people’s dreams, then there are no structural inequalities that publishers have to worry about that might have led to this state of affairs. And since those structural inequalities don’t exist, they can’t possibly be exacerbated by further industry consolidation.

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The story of American publishing over the past 100 years is the story of an industry consolidating itself, and of that consolidation encouraging homogeneity, blandness, and the safest possible publishing decisions. It remains to be seen whether that consolidation will continue as this trial ends — or whether this case will provide the precedent to slow consolidation in more industries than this one.

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Update! Judge blocks Penguin Random House’s merger acquisition of Simon & Schuster.

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Dionysus by DaughterGothel on DeviantArt