Jason Epstein was the publisher and editor of authors such as Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth and Gore Vidal. In his 2001 book, Book Business, he described how the once-relaxed Random House – where authors frequented the publishing office (and sometimes slept there), and where editors had stronger relationships with their authors than they did their colleagues – metamorphosed during the 1990s into a corporate powerhouse.
Three decades later, publishing appears much less intimate than it was. And a proposed merger of two of the “big five” publishers – Penguin Random House (itself made up of two big publishers, Penguin and Random House, which merged in 2013) and Simon and Schuster – promises to complicate it further.
