Meanwhile, take a walk down the corridors of what constituted the pre-Bertelsmann Random House, and the nervousness is palpable. People are waiting to see who will stay and who else will leave; what more will be "consolidated" and what will remain separate; where the budget money will be pulled from and where it will go. It would be simplistic to assert that Bertelsmann is some sort of evil empire gobbling up US publishing. Bertelsmann is far more serious about the enterprise than many other corporate owners have been--publishing, after all, is at its very core, unlike most of the other entertainment conglomerates. But is bigness always best for an enterprise as peculiarly individual as the writing and making and buying and selling of books?

Pursuing bigness, indeed, is the modus operandi on every front these days. There is the bigness of the handful of hugely consolidated houses that do most of the educational and trade publishing in this country and make publishing increasingly resemble the movie business; the bigness of the big-box stores and warehouse clubs that handle so many of the deeply discounted bestselling books, hardcovers that sell in previously undreamed-of mass quantities, so much so that the bottom has fallen out of the traditional mass-market paperback business; the bigness of the retail chains, B&N and Borders, with their brick-and-mortar establishments and Internet presence; and despite its "upstart" aura, the bigness of Amazon.com.

For most of this decade, there was the enormity, too, of the mountains of unsold books the retailers returned to the publishers. The practice of returns--initiated, Korda reminds us, by Simon & Schuster as a way to help struggling booksellers during the Depression--has gotten a little more under control of late, but it still remains an unresolved structural problem for the whole industry.

Then there is the bigness of the money that publishers put on the table as advances for sure-fire or even vaguely potential bestsellers. Korda shows how this came to be. First were the high-stakes paperback auctions, then the vertical, hardcover/paperback deals--the grandfather of them all being one that Leon Shimkin, Max Schuster's partner after Dick Simon, organized for Harold Robbins's The Carpetbaggers.

As editors and publishers became further removed from the owners of the companies, a realistic grasp on the money they were proposing to spend in the chase for the ultimate "hot" book became more elusive. Korda quotes one former executive, Ron Busch, who has since died, as saying that sometimes bidding on big books was "like playing Monopoly"--you could bid ridiculously high, because it wasn't, after all, your cash.

The feeding chain, whereby a small press publishes a new writer and then, after the work attracts attention and respectable sales, loses the author to a large house for a lot more money, is a fact of life. Rarely does this pattern reverse direction, except for those "midlist" authors whose work the big houses decide is no longer economically viable to publish.

How the book business will further evolve within this framework--at a time when the market for trade books is stagnant rather than growing--remains to be seen. The debacle of the scuttled merger between Barnes & Noble and Ingram shows that in some quarters there is a recognition that massive scale is not always best and can exact too high a price. And if one looks carefully inside the large houses, it is evident that those able to marry the clout of their financial resources to an ethos that allows them to "think small" in certain ways are happiest for author and publisher alike. Another illustration is provided by Korda himself: In his final chapter, he lists five "extraordinary" recent titles--Longitude, The Perfect Storm, Angela's Ashes, Into Thin Air and Cold Mountain--that prove "the public's ability to discern a remarkable book despite all the attention directed toward bad or mediocre ones." Is it any accident that three of them were published by smaller-scale, independent houses?

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