Book-binding

摘要

IN THE DAYS before Thanksgiving two top contenders emerged for Simon & Schuster, the fifth-biggest English-language book publisher by revenues, from Via-comcBS, an American media group. On November 25th Bertelsmann gained the upper hand. With an offer of $2.2bn the German parent of Penguin Random House (PRH), the largest publisher by a Tolstoyan margin, outbid News Corp, Rupert Murdoch's media group, whose catalogue contains HarperCollins, ranked third (see chart). A merger with Simon & Schuster would give PRH almost one-third of English-language book sales. That is more than double the market share of its closest rival, Ha-chette Livre, owned by Lagardere, an ailing French conglomerate. (Vivendi, a French group that is Lagardere's biggest shareholder, also briefly vied for Simon & Schuster.) In America the merged biblio-behe-moth would control 70% of the market for literary fiction.