IN 2013, TWO OF the biggest publishers in the world — Penguin and Random House — merged into one behemoth. At the time one might have read the merger as a defensive consolidation against Amazon’s monopsony, a scenario in which one buyer controls the majority of the market. But instead the Penguin Random House merger delivered efficiencies of exactly the kind cynics expected. Layoffs have hit PRH in discrete waves, each of them damaging to the diversity and range of the publisher’s books and the people who publish them. Editors, publicists, sales reps, and warehouse workers have been let go. Imprints — many of them already on their last legs, half-hearted relics of mergers past — have shuttered. Amazon, meanwhile, didn’t notice a thing, except that books probably arrived at its warehouses in more efficient batches. Any leverage PRH might have had — and still has — is unlikely to be deployed by current management, who are masters of the permanent defensive crouch.