"That's assuming we still have a Department of Justice," Karp wrote in the message.Īt one point, the judge appeared to support a core government argument - that greater concentration in the industry could reduce the compensation paid to authors. It's not all about us," Karp said.Īs an example, he said the nearly 100-year-old Simon & Schuster has endured more aggressive competition recently from Amazon's book publishing business.īut Justice Department attorney Jeff Vernon brought forward a message Karp had sent to John Irving, his favourite author, saying he didn't think the government would allow Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House to merge. "I think there are a lot of good publishers all over the country. With his possible future boss, Penguin Random House Markus Dohle, among those looking on in the courtroom, Karp rejected the Big Five moniker, calling it "parochial and ethnocentric." Under questioning later in the day, Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp detailed a world of fiercely competitive bidding among publishers - including between his firm and Penguin Random House - for authors' works, sometimes besting each other by millions of dollars for high-profile writers. "The Big Five are pretty entrenched," he said.
King crisply answered Schwarz's questions, with some moments of humor and brief flashes of gentle outrage, as he testified during the second day of the trial expected to last two to three weeks. As government attorney Mel Schwarz walked King through his history starting as a new, unknown author in the 1970s and his relationships with agents and publishers, King homed in on a critique of the industry as it is now. District Court in Washington - highly unusual for an antitrust trial - brought a narrative of the evolution of book publishing toward the dominance of the Big Five companies. Penguin Random House's side sees book publishing as dynamic and open to many, with the proposed merger having limited impact. The Justice Department sees an increasingly limited market for bestsellers, with the Big Five well in command. Over the first two days, attorneys for the two sides have presented notably contrasting views of the book industry. So is another former King publisher, Viking Press. The publisher of "Carrie," Doubleday, is now part of Penguin Random House. Now, New York publishing is often a story of the so-called Big Five: Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins Publishing, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan. As he noted in his remarks, there were dozens of publishers in New York when his breakthrough novel, "Carrie," came out, in 1974, and he has seen many of them either acquired by larger companies or forced out of business. King's remarkable career, with so many bestsellers he could only offer an estimate, has come amid waves of consolidation in the industry. The Justice Department is bidding to convince Pan that the proposed combination of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, two of the world's biggest publishers, would thwart competition and damage the careers of some of the most popular authors - a status King holds like few others. I'm a freelance writer," King said upon being asked to identify himself. Get the latest local updates right to your inbox.
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But once sworn in, he was relaxed and happy to talk, and ever alert to how to tell a story, The 74-year-old King had a haunting but gregarious presence, his gaunt features accented by his grey suit and grey sneakers, his walk tentative, as it has been since he was struck by a van and badly injured in 1999. Pan told the author after he finished speaking as a government witness in a federal antitrust lawsuit against the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, King's longtime publisher. "It was a real pleasure to hear your testimony," the otherwise businesslike U.S. But he did know how to please a crowd and even get the judge to thank him for his time. Stephen King didn't break any legal ground on the stand Tuesday as he testified against his own publisher's efforts to merge with Penguin Random House.