The World's Top 10 Book Publishers

The organizers of the upcoming Frankfurt Book Fair send out an e-newsletter to past and future attendees. My husband forwarded the latest edition to me and this caught my eye: A list of the top 10 book publishers in the world, their parent companies, their nation of origin, and how many billions they make a year. So here's the list:

1. Reed Elsevier (Reed Elsevier--UK/NL): 7.6 billion
2. Pearson (Pearson plc--UK): 7.3 billion
3. Thomson (Thomson Corp.--Canada) : 6.6 billion
4. Bertelsmann (Bertelsmann AG--Germany) : 5.9 billion
5. Wolters Kluwer (Wolters Kluwer--NL): 4.8 billion
6. Hachette Livre (Lagardère--France) : 2.56 billion
7. McGraw-Hill Education (The McGraw-Hill Cos.--US) : 2.52 billion
8. Reader’s Digest (Reader’s Digest--US): 2.3 billion
9. Scholastic Corp. (Scholastic--US): 2.2 billion
10. De Agostini Editore (Gruppo De Agostini--Italy): unavailable

The newsletter cites Livres Hebdo, a book-publishing trade publication in France, as the source of this information. The list actually out of date already. In May, the book division of Thomson was acquired by an investment group and renamed Cengage Learning (a name that Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino thinks is a huge handicap for them).

Although the biggest companies aren't headquartered in the U.S., they have massive operations here and own many, many of the companies and imprints we're familiar with, such as Harcourt, Prentice Hall, Random House, and Time Warner.