Little Creek Press creates a unique, innovative book publishing model
Book lovers may not realize just how big and monolithic the traditional publishing industry has become in recent decades. Dozens of publishing houses and imprints have shuttered, merged or been absorbed into what has become New York’s “Big Five” — Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster — at the expense, some critics say, of both authors and readers. In November, the federal government filed suit to stop the Big Five from becoming the Big Four after Penguin Random House made a bid to acquire Simon & Schuster. The suit claimed that the sale will give what is already the world’s largest publisher “outsized influence” over how much authors are paid and what the rest of us get to read.