Publishing Death Watch

The New York Times reported earlier this week on the supposedly-imminent departure of Random House CEO Peter Olson.

Schadenfreude alert: this is the same Olson who said to a reporter in 2003, while walking the halls at BEA, "I recognize hundreds of people here. Many of them worked for me. Many of them I fired personally. ... There are so many people here that I've fired that we could have a reunion." Perhaps now he will have time for that reunion.

The Times coverage is a bit sloppy and confused, though, at least as I see it. Their references to the Bertelsmann direct-to-consumer operations, for example, refers to the current conglomeration of music, video/DVD, and book operations as "book clubs," and makes inferences from that which I do not believe are warranted.

(Once again I quote from Publishers Weekly's Sara Nelson: "a closer look at the reports from B&N and Borders and the book clubs, and several off-the-record conversations with experts show that while revenue growth is sluggish, book sales are up slightly; it's the decline in sales of music CDs that have dragged the numbers down. You may not realize, for example, that while the old Bookspan's revenue last year was down from 2006's, it was still about $700 million.")

If the Times can't distinguish between an integrated direct-to-consumer powerhouse (which made a big deal about how big and integrated and cross-product it was when it was formed last year) and a "book club," what else does it get wrong?

And, on the Bertelsmann side, how much of this can really be ascribed to Olson to begin with? He's famously bottom-line-oriented, so it's hard to see how Bertelsmann can replace him with someone even more so and hope to continue in its dominant trade position. (Especially in big trade publishing, you need to spend money to make money.) I haven't seen figures to show that Random House did substantially worse than anyone else last year, which was a mediocre year (at best) for publishing, so blaming him for the Bush economy is rather cruel. (Crueler than Olson was to Ann Godoff? That's a separate question.) And he only took on oversight for the Direct Group in September of last year, so one might think that others could be more reasonably held accountable for that group's poor performance.

But it looks like he's going, to suffer for his sins or whoever else's.

My money's on "to spend more time with his family," though "to pursue outside interests" is a good possibility. BEA opens May 29th, so I'd expect Bertelsmann would want Olson out the door a good week before that, so it's not the only thing people are talking about at the show. I wonder if there's a secret Random House office pool to predict the day already?

Edit, 5/20: The news is hitting the wires this morning; Olson is out and Markus Dohle, a printing-company executive with no publishing experience and a plan to "shake up [Bertelsmann's] slow-growing businesses," is in.

And it always works out so well when people who don't understand a business are put in charge and told to change everything, doesn't it?

I'm so glad I don't work for Random right now. [New York Times; Wall Street Journal]