Reading Between the Lines

Last year, a high-profile antitrust trial blocked the attempted acquisition of Simon & Schuster by Penguin Random House, the largest of the United States’s Big Five publishers. The proceedings offered outsiders a peek behind the curtain of the contemporary publishing industry. What it revealed wasn’t especially romantic: a business more preoccupied with cultivating lucrative intellectual property and telegenic BookTokers than with questions of quality, craft, or the state of literary culture writ large. As the critic Christian Lorentzen wrote for Harper’s, publishing bigwigs like Markus Dohle—until recently the global chairman and CEO of PRH—now look upon the industry as a network of shareholders collaborating synergistically in the interest of profit: “In Dohle’s vision, everybody in the book business—publishers, agents, authors, publicists, cover designers, sales reps, printers, truck drivers, warehouse owners, independent booksellers, Amazon—were partners, and the more the books moved, the more money for all. If only every book could be a top seller!” How did we arrive at such dull ambitions?