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A comment on Amazon is reportedly negotiating to acquire MGM for about $9B. Parent comment

Re:Amazon is reportedly negotiating to acquire MGM for about... by kingsuper20 on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @10:18AM (#27194873)
As I understand it, the test for monopoly is detrimental effect for consumers, not control of a market. Making your company more vertically integrated (by buying a back catalog in this case I guess) probably doesn't trip any alarms.

I'm surprised that they don't buy Penguin. Maybe Bertelsmann has no interest in selling.

If you think about it, publishers of print/music/movies are essentially built on monopoly given the single sourcing of a title. It's not as simple as cornering the market on wheat or oil.

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Re:Amazon is reportedly negotiating to acquire MGM for about... by ghaff on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @10:28AM (#27195010)
Book publishing is a rather fragmented market and a lot of the growth is in self-publishing, which Amazon already own a big chunk of in various ways. I'm not sure why Amazon would have any interest in an old school publisher.
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Re:Amazon is reportedly negotiating to acquire MGM for about... by kingsuper20 on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @10:40AM (#27195201)
You can make the same argument about buying MGM.

Looking at Publishers Weekly, I see this:

"An important driver of print book sales last year was the continuing increase in backlist sales, McLean said. Backlist titles accounted for 67% of all print units purchased in 2020, up from 63% the year before. In 2010, backlist accounted for only 54% of all unit sales. " https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/b...

I think you could make a strong argument for buying a large publisher (or anything really) given a good ROI.

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