The news may have stripped twitter of inspiration, but will it also lay waste to the literary landscape? The Guardian thinks so: “Authors such as E L James, Salman Rushdie, John le Carre, Pippa Middleton, and Jamie Oliver may become bedfellows. No wonder agents and authors are using words like "scary" and "sad" in reaction to the news.” writes Philip Jones

But this is only bad news for the snobbish – those who think that highbrow authors must be protected from the lowbrow, lest they get infected, and believe publishing houses the best location for such a quarantine.

Even if you do believe this (and most people don’t find it hard to spot a Will Self from a JK Rowling, even with the same symbol on the spine), it’s the smaller and cash-strapped publishing houses that are having increasingly to rely on selling “50 shades rip-offs and cookbooks” (according to one industry member) in order to make ends meet.

With larger franchises like the newly created Penguin Random House there is the breathing space to experiment with new authors, and, as Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino said,  “to share a large part of their costs, to invest more for their author and reader constituencies and to be more adventurous in trying new models."

While it is true that the merger means one fewer individual publisher to negotiate with, (argued by agents  in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and BBC) it also creates one considerably wealthier, and therefore more adventurous publisher.

David Kuhn, a literary agent, told the New York Times “If there are 20 fewer imprints, then that means there are 20 fewer publishers with checkbooks willing to make bets on less-known entities”. But with publishers being squeezed by a shrinking industry, these sorts of bets, increasingly, are off.

The enemy is not the merged company, but the behemoths Amazon, Apple and Google that are driving the e-book business and edging publishers out. And as the music business showed last month, with the merging of Universal and EMI, industries that are not the tech industry must combine forces to avoid being subsumed.