Book Publishing in the US and Elsewhere, 2005-2010

Is Your Job Already Outsourced? (part 2 of 3)

(Click here for Part 1)

Last time, I looked at ownership of large book publishers in 2004. We saw that many large American book publishers were taken over by foreign print book publishing companies. In 2010 the picture is way worse. Those large foreign book publishers have themselves been swallowed up by even bigger media conglomerates.

Let’s look first at what happened to American book publishers and then to big foreign publishers, including Bertlesmann, Thomson, and Taylor and Francis, the leaders in 2004.

If you check recent US stock statistics, the results for “publishers” are quite strange-looking. Top companies in terms of volume of trading are: Ep Global Communs Inc.; News Corporation; Gannett Co Inc.; McGraw-Hill; Thompson Reuters Corp.; Marvel Entertainment; Yellow Pages; Income Trust Units; Mcclatchy Co. Hld.; New York Times; Idearc Inc (a Verizon spinoff).; and Martha Stewart Living.

This is certainly a very catholic group of companies, with McGraw-Hill being the only well-known book publisher. The rest are an eclectic combination of newspaper, magazine, and even phone book and comic book publishers. What gives?

According to Dan Poynter, well-known advocate of self-publishing, the top six publishers by size today are: BERTELSMANN, CBS CORPORATION, HACHETTE, NEWS CORPORATION, PEARSON, and VERLAGSGRUPPE. Many of these companies are privately owned corporations.

The only American-born-and-bred corporation among the big six is CBS CORPORATION which took over SIMON & SCHUSTER. 

So, let’s look at who the other five giants are.

BERTELSMANN, a German company, owns RTL Television along with RANDOM HOUSE, INC., “the world’s largest English language trade publisher.” Bertelsmann’s founder, Reinhard Mohn, died last October. His company is private and family-owned.

HACHETTE LIVRE is the largest book publishing company in France and the second largest publisher in the world. It is a subsidiary of Lagardère Media, the media division of Groupe Lagardère, a limited partnership holding company. Hatchette Livre’s U.S. division, Hatchette Book Group, includes TIMES WARNER BOOKS. Hatchette also took over LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY.

NEWS CORP., is a publicly-owned company founded by Australian media mogul, Rupert Murdoch. It is the largest media company in the world. It holds properties all over the world in film, television, cable, magazines, newspapers, book publishing, and professional sports, with Fox TV likely its best known property. News Corp owns HARPERCOLLINS, a combination of American book publisher, HARPER & ROW, and British COLLINS.

PEARSON PUBLISHING is a publicly-owned UK-based media corporation that claims to be the world-leader in education, business information and consumer book publishing. It owns the former leading secondary education publisher in America, PRENTICE HALL, along with the UK publisher, THE PENGUIN GROUP, which previously acquired PUTNAM. PENGUIN-PUTNAM was the second largest trade publisher in the world.

VERLAGSGRUPPE (Bauer Media Group) is a private family-owned media company in Hamburg, Germany that operates in 15 countries in the world and publishes nearly 300 magazines, including Q, a UK music magazine similar to Rolling Stone.

Other book publishing imprints such as ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, HENRY HOLT & COMPANY, FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX and MACMILLAN were taken over by the German family-owned media conglomerate, HOLTZBRINCK PUBLISHING HOLDINGS.

INFORMA PLC, a publicly-owned UK conference and event promoter, took over FRANCIS AND TAYLOR in 2004.

Last, but not least, THOMPSON CORPORATION, a Canadian book publishing giant, spun off a number of it’s educational publishing divisions and merged with Reuters to become THOMSON-REUTERS, an “intelligent information” and “technology” company focused on financial news.

Book publishing is not the main business of these giant worldwide conglomerates. They are actually global media companies with a lot of diverse activities under the umbrella. 

The few well-known American book publishers, such as JOHN WILEY and MCGRAW-HILL, who have survived the conglomeration trend can hardly compete with these international behemoths.

McGraw-Hill, however, is trying. Its About page on the Web says:

“McGraw-Hill aligns with three enduring global needs

• the need for Capital
• the need for Knowledge
• the need for Transparency”

This hardly sounds like the mission of a traditional American book publisher!

The reality is, book publishing is no longer a very important medium within the context of media. CBS Corporation, for example, is far more concerned with what’s happening at NBC or Fox than it is with what’s going on with Simon & Schuster. And with the emergence of new media such as Amazon’s kindle, Barnes and Noble’s nook, and Apple’s iPad, “print” may soon become a thing of the past.

Next time: Online Publishing: The New Frontier

SOURCES: http://www.investools.com and Dan Poynter’s site, http://parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cfm

Copyright © 2010 Nancy K. Humphreys