US regulators have sued to block the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, which would have created a mega-publisher in the US books market.
Bertelsmann, which owns Penguin Random House, last November struck a $2.2bn deal to acquire Simon & Schuster from ViacomCBS, significantly outbidding Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in a deal that aimed to merge some of the world’s most popular authors, from EL James and Stephen King to George Orwell and F Scott Fitzgerald.
If the merger were to proceed, “Penguin Random House would be, by far, the largest book publisher in the United States, towering over its rivals”, the US Department of Justice wrote in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in Washington federal court.