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I agree that there are people who subvert the spirit of democracy to pass laws and rules that benefit them. But I think the situation is different here from the example you cite.
For starters, I'm not clear on what the limits actually are in this case. Presumably, Puffin and Penguin are only willing to go so far in pushing this new line of books. But the response to them seems mostly at outrage over changing the books. Have you found any demands to boycott or threaten legal action against them? I haven't. It's largely just empty words, and I think they'd be monitoring the response with an intense focus to see just this.
Secondly, they ultimately backed down and said they'd publish both versions. This makes for an excellent marketing ploy - plenty of people will probably go and buy a copy to have an "untainted version".
I can't fully discount the idea that Puffin will quietly just remove the classic version eventually. But if the botched delivery of this update is anything to go by, people will more widely have the original anyways, and finding illegal copies online isn't that hard even now. So if the goal is having people read the more moral version, then I think Puffin is planning uncharacteristically long into the future, for a company anyways.
So what?
A recent theme in my comments is the "democratic model" of our society, and how I think it's bunk, and I am once again forced to go on my little rant. From the youngest years we are taught that not only do we live in a democracy, but that somehow our entire society follows the principle of "the more people hold an opinion, the more important that opinion is" with the implicit assumption that no other factors are relevant. The idea that publishers are afraid of boycotts is laughable, show me the last successful consumer boycott. Even when they just produce shit no one wants to watch because it's crap, sans any boycott, half the time they proceed to shit on their audience for "not getting it" rather than adjusting to the majority opinion so they can start making money.
In my mind it's pretty clear that the democratic model is false. I think it's completely fine if you think it's true, and want to argue for it, but you actually have to do it, rather than assume it's true by default, and expect everyone else to make arguments within that framework.
The problem here is that you can come up with an explanation like no matter what happens. If they back down, it's a marketing ploy. If they don't back down, like in the case of Blood Heir from a few years ago, or the withdrawal of the Winnetou books in Germany last summer, you can just say "well, I guess the books really were that controversial, and the author / publisher wanted to avoid backlash".
It's an ok theory, but a theory is not evidence for itself.
The goal is to have people of a particular ideology have control over media. They're not acting as a company, the people working for the company are acting as members of a religion they want to spread far and wide.
Perhaps I'm missing the point, but if they're not even afraid of boycotts, then what are the limits here? You argued that their actions had material limits, but you now seem to be arguing that they don't care if you boycott their materials or not. If so, they would have greater reason to not back down if they actually cared, no?
If Puffin had stuck to their guns, I would have no way of calling it a cash grab and I acknowledge that. It would have, in my opinion, been them sacrificing money to make a moral statement.
A boycott is just one way of running into material limits. "I don't want to buy your shitty product" is another. If you want to claim that this is what you meant by boycott, that boycotts are usually require deliberate action and organization, the lack of which you cited as evidence, while not wanting to buy shit does not.
Then there's what I called "political" limits. If everyone around you is pointing at you and calling you a clown, you might find yourself ostracized from the industry. This sort of stuff hurts even if you have tons of popular support, as Louis C.K. and Dave Chapelle show.
Yes, like I said in that case the mundane explanation would become "the books actually are this controversial, the publishers are just following the will of the market". In either case it would not be possible that the mundane explanation is not true.
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People in charge are hired managers responsible to other hired managers, all the way up to BlackRock/Vanguard. The goal they care about is their personal future, and are wary of anything that might endanger it, like, for example, being suspected of racism and hate.
"The book we just printed is full of racism! There is massive outcry and backlash against the company! Who authorized it for print?"
"At your last job, why were you publishing racist books? Are your racist, or willing accomplice of racists? Why should we hire hater like you?"
Sure, this might happen. Except Puffin has said the following:
This seems to suggest an internal motivation, not an external one. Of course, I think it wouldn't be hard for someone to plan on generating a controversy this way regardless, but I'll admit I can't decisively prove it.
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