Having Fun With the Unsettling Random House-Penguin Possible Merger

So of course you have already heard that Penguin and Random House, 2 of the Big 6 publishers, had to respond to rumors that they are in talks to merge.  Click here, here, or here for news.

Read the articles to see all of the concerns expressed, but among my biggest is that if the merger happened today, 7 of the top 15 NYT Best sellers would be published by this company (as I saw here).

But hey, this is only talk among two big publishers.  US and EU antitrust people would have a say too. This is by no means it is a done deal.  So, why not have fun with the news instead of fretting over something that would never happen.

Today at the BPL we were debating the new name.  In my informal poll, Random Penguin is narrowly beating Penguin House. Both are too fun and funny for me to think such venerable companies would use either.  Although, seriously, Random Penguin is memorable.

GalleyCat has found people creating hilarious Random Penguin images and is posting the conversation here.  My favorite is the one I have embedded which makes fun of another popular meme.

Here's to keeping the conversation light and fun. We will have plenty of time to freak out about how terrible this will be for authors, book sellers, and librarians IF it actually happens.

Have a nice weekend.