That's basically the DoJ's argument -- that consolidation in the publishing world will reduce title diversity, because the incentive is to focus advances and ma

That's basically the DoJ's argument -- that consolidation in the publishing world will reduce title diversity, because the incentive is to focus advances and marketing budgets on a small number of potential hits, and the fewer the publishers, the more those hitmaking authors are going to be concentrated into a couple of houses. Alternatively, a larger number of smaller publishers will spread out resources and so more effectively drive a greater number and type of titles. In response, the defendants claimed that, risibly, publishers are just a bunch of idiot hicks who don't have any idea how to market a book successfully and, anyway, wouldn't know a hit if Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald all reached over the transom and slapped them silly with the manuscript -- basically, "we're all so incompetent at our chosen industry that we couldn't even take advantage of our oligopsony if we had it." Which I find ... questionable.