The Invisible Forces Behind the Books We Read

The ownership of the American publishing house Simon & Schuster has been much in the news over the past couple of years. First Penguin Random House tried to swallow it up, then a fascinating antitrust trial put a bunch of agents and writers on the witness stand. A judge eventually quashed that merger as potentially monopolistic, and more recently, a private-equity fund, KKR, swooped in to buy the company.

If you’re a shareholder or an employee of any of those companies, these have been hugely consequential events. But I can’t be the only person who has wondered: If you’re just someone who enjoys reading good books, why does any of this matter at all?

The most buzzed-about work of literary scholarship published this past year, Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, promises to answer that question. The subtitle says it all: Sinykin, an English professor at Emory University, proposes to tell us not just how the purchasing of smaller publishing companies by bigger, diversified ones has transformed the industry’s financial structures but also, much more interesting, how it has changed literature itself.

Let me be clear: Sinykin’s book is delightful, smart, and teeming with insights. As a concise historical survey of changes within the publishing business