Penguin Pulled into ASI Controversy

What a smart ploy by the lawyer community to wait until Author Solutions, Inc (ASI) became part of Penguin before filing this suit. Or maybe it's just circumstance and not calculated timing. ASI was bought by Pearson PLC (the company that owns Penguin) in July 2012. A previous GITP post had noted that ASI was under investigation.  And now--Class Action Law Suit. 

Part of the suit states that

"Author Solutions also fails to take diligent care of its authors' works, making numerous and egregious publisher errors - errors made by the publisher, not the author. These errors include errors on book covers, in addition to various typographical and formatting errors. In fact, Author Solutions profits from its own mistakes. Aggressive sales techniques ensure that these errors are corrected only for a fee of several hundred dollars. Even though, as a matter of policy, Author Solutions promises to correct publisher errors for free, it rarely does...."

It will be interesting to see this play out.

The Big Get Bigger

Maybe.
A merger of Penguin and Random House is in the works. If successful, the new corporation could control nearly 25% of the book sales in the UK and U.S. 

Good?
Bad?

Hmm.