Antitrust Trial

In a confident and assured filing of “findings of fact and conclusions of law,” the Department of Justice restated for the final time their case to block Penguin Random House’s acquisition of Simon & Schuster. “The proposed acquisition is precisely the march toward concentration and monopsony power that Congress enacted the Clayton Act to prevent. One entity’s control of almost half of the nation’s anticipated top-selling books threatens competition in multiple ways. Authors’ advances would fall—advances that they use to pay their bills and that reflect compensation for their work. The contractual terms publishers offer authors would worsen. Authors would […]

The antitrust trial is only just now officially over. On Wednesday the parties filed their final objections to each other’s “proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law” (which were submitted last week), and by the end of day today redacted versions of all of those extensive documents become public. Only PRH’s redacted public filings were available as of press time; we will provide a full analysis of all of the filings when the DOJ’s are available. The findings of fact lay out in numbered sequence each party’s interpretation of the key evidence presented at trial. As we have suggested […]

On Friday, publishing’s big trial came to end–even if an anticlimactic one. Further to our attempt at live transcription on Friday, attached here are the final arguments in full. In his closing, DOJ attorney John Read recognized the “passion” involved in writing and publishing books, but noted that this trial is about business and law. “This is about the largest publisher, Penguin Random House, cementing its position” at the top of the market, he said “which is per se illegal, and the defendants have failed to rebut that presumption.” PRH counsel Daniel Petrocelli continued to assert that the government’s $250,000 advance […]

Given the keen interest and timeliness of the closing arguments presented Friday morning in the antitrust trial, we’re going against our usual practices here. What you see below is our version of something between live tweeting and live transcribing, trying to capture the major points and moments, without delving into the case law. As we’ve been doing the whole trial, we will update this post over the weekend with fact-checked quotes, and full transcripts so you can read the arguments in full. We apologize in the meantime for any typos or mistaken abbreviations as we fed these remarks back to […]

In auctions? In best bids? In GUPPIs whatever they are? In options? In Second Score? Better-best, too? How about books? Seasons of books…. OK, so we’re a little punchy: Thursday in court was filled with more fine-grain redirect of the two economics experts, as both sides revisited ground already covered. Defense expert Dr. Snyder’s asserted 23 percent of instances in which non-big-five publishers were winners (9 percent) or runners-up came up again and again — in part because of Dr. Snyder’s own confusion and overestimation on Wednesday about how many deals that comprised. It should have simply been in the […]

Just three short but endless weeks after it started, the DOJ’s antitrust trial seeking to block Penguin Random House’s acquisition of Simon & Schuster ends Friday with closing arguments. (We’ll run as much as we can in today’s edition of Publishers Lunch; if there is more after our deadline we’ll post further over the weekend. Either way, we’ll share the full text when we can, as we have been doing throughout the trial.) Without pre-judging the outcome — since, as we have shown, Judge Florence Pan has been very much in charge of this trial from start to finish — […]