Excellent post by Joe Esposito over at Scholarly Kitchen today on Vestron’s Law. Oddly enough, it touched on ideas and principles I mention in a blog post over on EoinPurcell.com today. Happy timing because Joe’s post gives a much better theoretical foundation to what I am saying than I could have:

Vestron’s Law also accounts for many structural changes in the publishing industry.  During the 1980s, for example, trade book publishers began to talk of “vertical integration,” by which they meant that a hardcover house, which originated titles, should be aligned with a mass market paperback house, which in those days was the key source of publishing revenue; paperback houses licensed rights from hardcover publishers. Thus Random House bought Fawcett hardcover house purchasing a paperback company and New American Library, where I worked at the time, acquired Dutton paperback publisher acquires a hardcover house.  The culmination of this trend came about when Bantam, the leading paperback house, acquired Random House, the leading trade publisher.

via Vestron’s Law: The Propensity for Rights to Revert to the Original Publisher « The Scholarly Kitchen.