A nausea-inducing business story......

[marmar]

News Corporation Is Said to Bid for Penguin
By AMY CHOZICK


Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has entered what could become a bidding war for Pearson PLC’s Penguin book publishing division, according to a person briefed on the talks who could not discuss private negotiations publicly.

News Corporation’s interest comes just days after Pearson confirmed that German media giant Bertelsmann, the parent company of Random House, had approached the British company about acquiring its Penguin division.

News Corporation owns HarperCollins, one of the units of the media conglomerate that will soon be spun off into a separate publicly traded company consisting of other print assets like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post.

Penguin, which publishes authors like Juno Diaz and crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, would give HarperCollins greater scale as the book industry grapples with how to take on technology companies like Amazon, Google and Apple, whose cheap e-books have transformed the publishing landscape. ........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/news-corporation-is-said-to-bid-for-penguin/?hp