Like most mass media, commercial publishing is dominated by a handful of major corporations with ties to international media conglomerates. And since the 1960s and 1970s—when CBS acquired Holt, Rinehart and Winston; Popular Library; and Fawcett—mergers and consolidations have driven the book industry. For example, the CBS Corporation (formerly Viacom) now also owns Simon & Schuster and its imprints, including Pocket Books; and News Corp. now owns HarperCollins and all of its imprints, including Avon (see Table 10.2).

One of the largest publishing conglomerates is Germany’s Bertelsmann. Starting in the late 1970s with its purchase of Dell for $35 million and its 1980s purchase of Doubleday for $475 million, Bertelsmann has been building a publishing dynasty. In 1998, Bertelsmann shook up the book industry by adding Random House, the largest U.S. book publisher, to its fold. With this $1.4 billion purchase, Bertelsmann became the world’s largest publisher of English-language books.¹² Bertelsmann’s book companies include Ballantine Bantam Dell, Doubleday Broadway, Alfred A. Knopf, and Random House Publishing Group and its imprints including Modern Library and Fodor’s Travel. In 2013, Random House merged with Penguin Books, creating Penguin Random House, and gaining control of about one-quarter of the book industry.

Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster (owned by CBS), Lagadère (based in France), HarperCollins (owned by News Corp.), and Macmillan (owned by German-based Holtzbrinck) are the five largest trade book publishers in the United States. From a corporate viewpoint, executives have argued that large companies can financially support a number of smaller firms or imprints while allowing their editorial ideas to remain independent from the parent corporation. With thousands of independent presses competing with bigger corporations, book publishing continues to produce volumes on an enormous range of topics. Still, the largest trade book publishers and independents alike find themselves struggling in the industry’s digital upheaval and the dominance of Amazon.com in the distribution of e-books.

TABLE 10.2

WORLD’S TEN LARGEST TRADE BOOK PUBLISHERS (REVENUE IN MILLIONS OF DOLLARS), 2011

Source: “The Global 50: The World’s Largest Book Publishers, 2012,” June 25, 2012, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/52677-the-world-s-54-largest-book-publishers-2012.html

Note: McGraw-Hill agreed to sell its education publishing business to Apollo Global Management for $2.5 billion in 2012. In 2013, Pearson’s Penguin Books merged with Bertelsmann’s Random House.