Book sales are declining globally but the princelings of private equity still think there’s money in publishing. The WSJ says KKR is in advanced talks to buy Simon & Schuster from Paramount Global for $1.65 billion. That’s a good deal less than the $2.2 billion Paramount hoped to get for S & S from Penguin Random House earlier this year, but that deal was blocked as anti-competitive by a federal judge. This probably won’t be, analysts say, because KKR is not a publisher itself even though it has an interest in Politico via a stake in Axel Springer. In another age, Simon & Schuster published Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald. It still draws big names, including Stephen King, Bob Woodward, Trump’s ex-Vice President Mike Pence (So Help Me God) and Colleen Hoover, the Texan phenomenon whose bodice-rippers were initially self-published but are now often displayed, elbowing all rivals aside, under the sign “TikTok made me buy it.”
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