It's Time to Wield Antitrust Against the Publishing Industry

The merger would reduce the number of major U.S. book publishing entities from five to four.

The application of simple-minded antitrust principles to the book publishing industry has had consistently malign effects.

In the United States and Britain, the application of antitrust laws to the book trade has centered on the permissibility of resale price maintenance.

American publishers were permanently traumatized by an antitrust judgment against them several years later secured by Macy's department store in New York, whose president later admitted that "Best-selling" books were the ideal loss leader since they appealed to persons of better-than-average income and were not big-ticket items.

These were eviscerated by the courts in the 1950s over the protests of Justices Frankfurter and Black, leading to the concentration of American book retailing in Amazon and Barnes & Noble; the concomitant concentration of publishing led to ever-greater advances for a handful of books and the virtual disappearance of unsubsidized mid-list titles.

When new antitrust legislation was enacted, book trade price maintenance was challenged in the Restrictive Practices Court and upheld in an eloquent judgment in 1962: "There may not be many mute inglorious Miltons about, but there may be some, and we think the chances of their muteness would be increased if publishers were constrained to be less adventurous than they are today." Finally, after new legislation, price maintenance for books was eradicated in 1997 by a judge who had been a former antitrust prosecutor; within two years, half of Britain's independent booksellers had disappeared.

The desire of the heads of large aggregates to avoid giving political offense is present in book publishing as in all industries.
 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/its-time-to-wield-antitrust-against-the-publishing-industry/