Ooooo, they can call themselves Penguin House or Random Penguin!

Well, $NYT is down 24 percent today.

Look, there's a reason why Zynga downsized - everything is moving cheaper faster smaller.

Mobile, baby. So when do we get game apps for SLOG for our iPhone5, btw?

@1 beat me to it.

Anyone who has had any professional dealings with large publishers such as these two, and most others, knows that the large publishers cannot compete in the new environment. They are lazy management-bureaucracies with high turnover in editorial positions and a huge lack of inhouse editorial talent. In short: large publishers have not been doing their jobs for a couple of decades now.

Not all of the large publishers will survive. Mergers like this are the first step. Eventually many of them will go out of business, their intellectual property sold off to lower-overhead operations that may or may not be actual publishers (if you had a chance to buy some of Penguin's copyrights and then publish as as e-books, wouldn't you?).

There is not a lack of diversity in publishing. That is totally incorrect. Their are thousands of small publishers putting out thousands of awesome, interesting, unique books every year. What there is a lack of is diverse *marketing*: when you enter a bookstore, you won't see many books from small publishers because those publishers can't compete with Penguin's or Random House's marketing and placement operations (ie, they can't afford to buy high-profile placement).

We are moving into a self-publishing era, as well, facilitated by e-books. While it's true (as was pointed out in an earlier post) that most self-published titles are in sore need of editing and copyediting, our need for that kind of hand-holding as readers really dates only to the 1920s; self-publishing is in many ways a return to the freer editorial practices of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Large publishers and the way they have practiced editorial oversight of manuscripts are becoming anachronistic.

Think of publishers as stream conduits for data.

Their role is to advertise, to edit, to ensure a base level of quality in the stream.

Anything that meets that need, and is trusted by the unwashed public who prefer "penny dreadfuls" to "high literary publications", will survive.

Provided they learn to use software and humans to provide both spell check and grammatical check features.