Throughout the merger-and-acquisition part of his tale, Korda acts very much as apologist for Dick Snyder, whom he dubs, odd as it may seem to many publishing eyes, "the victim of success." But the question begs to be asked, What has been gained and lost in all this "success"?

I remember writing about S&S's purchase of Prentice-Hall for Publishers Weekly. Many longstanding PH employees--whom S&S valued and wanted to keep--were numbed by the change. Confusion reigned: Sometimes it was hard to find out where people were, and even the switchboard didn't know for sure. The culture of the company had been shattered.

Of course, companies, in order to thrive, have to evolve. Even in large shake-ups, people eventually adjust and the pieces are put back together another way. But something is lost, something human and valuable, a cultural intangible involving creativity and trust and people's sheer pleasure in the work they do--something that rarely, if ever, can be completely regained.

One sure sign of this has been a shift in loyalty on the part of many authors. In the beginning, they owed their loyalty to the publisher-owners like Knopf and Cerf and Schuster. Then, as the companies were sold to corporations, their loyalty was placed more and more with their editors. Now, with so many editors hopping houses or being forced to hop, it has been transferred to their agents. And the agents' power has increased enormously, as deal brokers and as gatekeepers deciding whether a book has a chance at being published at all.

Another sign is the level of anxiety being felt in the industry. Korda tells us that "having fun has always been an integral part of the book-publishing business," but the parties and lunches and gossip circuit are weighed down with a lot more heavy baggage these days. In the major houses, job security is a thing of the past. People have become almost inured to the sudden announcement that a well-known editor in chief or publisher "has left the company to pursue other interests" or that one imprint is being folded into another because of the requisite "economies of scale." Nevertheless, the moves that Bertelsmann has just taken toward consolidation, what most anticipate is only the first round of restructuring, have sent shivers throughout the business. (The timing of the announcement, on the eve of the Memorial Day holiday, when fewer people would be around to hear the news, could hardly have been coincidental.)

It is not simply that "reorganizing" Random House by merging Dell into Bantam, Broadway Books into Doubleday and combining Anchor with Vintage goes against Bertelsmann's earlier assurances. What was shocking was the price Bertelsmann was willing to pay for such consolidation, including the loss of Dell president Carole Baron and, shortly before the announcement, "by mutual agreement," Broadway president William Shinker, the president and publisher of Broadway--plus the loyalty of some major authors.

After all, the most valuable properties any publishing company has are the creativity, savvy and relationships with authors and agents that have been forged by its top editors and publishers. Thomas Harris, the bestselling author of The Silence of the Lambs, who had moved to Dell to work with Baron on his newest book, Hannibal, made that clear in an unusually forthright public statement: "Relieving Carole Baron as president and publisher of Dell in order to follow some mechanical blueprint of corporate structure is a mindless waste of the company's best resources."

By its nature, publishing has traditionally craved--and succeeded by--emphasizing what is individual in scale, as Korda's stories ultimately attest. Under truly massive consolidation, where will individuality and the history and knowledge that an individual brings to the business fit?

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