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It is a rule of thumb that when businesses bump up against the limits of ordinary growth, they seek to carry on by grabbing hold of a competitor. It's a post-market peak phenomenon. We have seen such mergers in the oil industry, the mining industry, retailing, telecommunications, food, you name it. And today, two media titans, Bertelsmann and Pearson have announced that they will merge their book publishing divisions, respectively, Random House and Penguin.

It looks like more of the same: slam together two great enterprises that have run out of gas, combine resources and slash costs to get more profit. Big may not be beautiful but at least it has better margins, goes the argument. Large publishers are no different to other elderly 20th century businesses; arguably they are even more cluttered with the underemployed and the overeducated. Moreover, publishers today are just too small to stand up to the powerful e-book retailers, such as Amazon.

All this is true but the solution is not necessarily bigger publishers. A merger may not help Penguin and Random House to survive the coming winter because the climate is fundamentally changing. Unlike a Kraft or a Unilever which can sell more soap, chocolate and cheese through the same channels, these businesses – Penguin and Random House – are not selling consumer staples, and the markets that publishers serve have been utterly transformed by technology.

This is not a plea that all books are special or precious. They are, if successful, fast-moving consumer goods just like ice cream. What has changed is how we buy them but, more importantly, how books and authors find their audience. It is possible that what the internet has done to book publishing (and other commercial art) is not just to introduce new kinds of distribution, but to undermine the point of publishing as a business. In essence, the purpose of Random House and Penguin is to tell you what to read. They are not just arbiters of taste, they market and promote their stable of favourite authors – the Grishams, Clancys and Folletts. In an atomised, YouTube world, identifying authors with the potential to be bestsellers from their manuscripts is almost impossible. Random House has put E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey into bookshops, long after it became a bestseller.

It's not just publishing that is undermined, it is the promotion of media stars, whether writers, artists or singers. In a recent article in the Financial Times, "The mass media has lost is perspective," David Hockney, the British artist, argues that just as technology had created the mass media, it is now taking that power away. Printing technology took the control of media away from the church where people once looked at powerful images painted by artists on the walls of cathedrals. That power of imagery was then handed to governments and large corporations with radio and television. It is this age that is ending, Hockney argues. The mass media needed "stars" but how do you get famous on YouTube, he asks and Hockney suggests that the corollary to Andy Warhol's famous quip about fifteen minutes of fame is that in the future nobody will be famous.

Of course, that won't really happen, but the transience of pop stars is a good warning to media companies that their marketing investments may be built on quicksand. It is no accident that live music is having a resurgence and that today's divas are athletes, not auto-tuned pop stars or actors enhanced by computer graphics. My guess is that mega-publishing will not deliver the promised returns. It will be small enterprises, led by enthusiasts, that will deliver the blockbusters and the masterpieces. That cannot be a bad thing.

Carl Mortished is a financial journalist and freelance consultant based in the U.K. Born in Montreal and a McGill graduate, he has a deep knowledge of the financial, energy and commodity markets. Mr. Mortished's career has spanned investment banking, journalism and consulting for major companies. He has written for leading financial publications including the Wall Street Journal and was for many years World Business Editor of The Times of London.

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