Penguin Group

• 1. Introduction

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  Penguin Group is a British trade book publisher, and on the 1st of July 2013 its future changed with the finalising of a merger. From that day it became part of a new company called Penguin Random House. A publisher founded in 1935 had joined forces with a rival that ranked beside it among the largest in the business. How did a single British imprint grow large enough to be one of the so-called Big Six? Why did American prosecutors name it in a lawsuit over e-books? And who ended up owning the whole enterprise?

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• 2. The Acquisition Trail

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  In 1970, Pearson Longman bought Penguin Books Ltd, the British company established in 1935. That purchase turned Penguin from a standalone publisher into a piece of a larger group. Five years later, in 1975, Penguin bought the American hardcover firm Viking Press. In 1986 it added the New American Library, which published mass-market paperbacks. Then came 1995, when Penguin acquired the independent publisher Donald I. Fine.

  The biggest American deal arrived in 1996. Penguin bought Putnam Berkley from MCA and merged it with Penguin Books USA. The result was a company first called Penguin Putnam Inc. In 2003 it took the name Penguin Group (USA) Inc. The new name matched a wider plan by its parent, Pearson PLC, to place every Penguin company worldwide under one supervisory Penguin Group division.

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• 3. Imprints Around the World

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  A registered office in the City of Westminster, London, anchors Penguin Books. Its British arm is Penguin Books Ltd. Separate divisions operate in the United States, Ireland, New Zealand, India, Australia, Canada, China, Brazil and South Africa.

  Inside these divisions sits a crowd of imprints. Many of them were once independent publishers with their own names and identities. The American company also runs a speaker's bureau, which books speaking engagements for many of its authors. Then, in 2011, it launched Book Country, an online community for writing and publishing, as a subsidiary of Penguin Group USA.

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• 4. The E-Book Price Case

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  On the 11th of April 2012, the United States Department of Justice filed United States v. Apple Inc. The defendants were Apple, Penguin and four other major publishers. Prosecutors alleged that they had conspired to fix e-book prices, and that the scheme was meant to weaken the position of Amazon.com in the market. That conduct, the suit said, violated antitrust law.

  The publishers settled. In December 2013, a federal judge approved an agreement under which Penguin and the others paid into a fund. The fund provided credits to customers who had overpaid for books because of the price-fixing.

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• 5. From Big Six to Big Five

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  On the 26th of October 2012, Pearson opened talks with the rival conglomerate Bertelsmann. The question was whether their publishing companies, Penguin Group and Random House, could be combined. Both were counted among the Big Six publishing houses of the day. Their union would shrink that group to the Big Five. The European Union approved the merger on the 5th of April 2013.

  When the deal closed, Bertelsmann initially owned 53% of the joint venture and Pearson PLC owned the remaining 47%. That balance did not last. Since the 18th of December 2019, Bertelsmann has owned Penguin Random House outright.

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