I’m often wondering why so few business people tell the “inside story”. There are 1,000s of rip-offs, betrayals and dirty deals every day, but often in the shame of it, folks keep quiet.
This link features a good honest rant.
And it points out a libertine mood in the book publishing sector that may haunt America.
Many people seem to think this is just another bankruptcy story. But it is, in its own way, possibly bigger than Enron or World Com.
Thomson bought Delmar and then Aspen. Harcourt bought Academic Press and Mosby, joining them up with previous acquisition Saunders. Then Thomson and Reed-Elsevier divvied up Harcourt.
Between 1999 and 2003, ten different [companies] became two. That consolidation created an “oligopoly.” Unlike a monopoly, which is capitalism taken to its logical (and disastrous) extreme on the supply side, an oligopoly is capitalism taken to its extreme by a limited number…
When the History channel picked the most important people of the past 1000 years at the turn of the millennium, number one was Johann Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press. Because without him, the narrator said, there would never have been a way for the great scientists, scholars, and promoters of democracy to get their ideas to the world. And we can’t afford to let what Gutenberg invented by rubbed out by corporate greed five centuries later.