Following the Money

September 5, 2014

Every now and then someone publishes a link that should be slipped into every board packet in the nation. I'd like to highlight this report: "Exploring Connections: Independent Publishers and Research Libraries," by Amy Ballmer, Albert Municino, Judith Schwartz, and Robert Weiss for the Metropolitan New York Library Council.

There's a lot of good information here: a snapshot of most of the relevant information at a time of revolutionary change both in publishing and in libraries.

In addition to some cogent history and analysis, I found these profiles of some of the big players in publishing.

First, let's look at the top 5 US publishers (2013 publications, based on 2012 data):

Company	Annual Sales
Amazon	$61 billion
Disney	$42.3 billion
News Corporation	$33.7 billion
Bertelsmann AG	$19 billion
CBS	$14.1 billion

Now let's look at the Big Six.

Company	Parent Company	Annual Revenues
Random House	Bertelsmann AG	$2.2 billion
Penguin	Pearson	$1.6 billion
Hachette	Legardere Media	$1.3 billion
Simon and Schuster	CBS	$790 million
MacMillan	Holtzbrinck	$454 million
HarperCollins	News Corporation	$220 million

What interests me about all this is the relative size of things. It's a little easier to see who has marketplace clout. Among the Big Six (now Five, of course, since Random House and Penguin have joined together), there's quite a gap between the first and last spots.

But it's when we compare all this to the bigger corporate ownership that things get clearer. First, the Big Five aren't a very big piece of the larger corporate puzzle. That is, publishing doesn't seem to be the big dog in the world of media; it is the tail.

Second, to choose a somewhat larger mammal metaphor, Amazon has a whale of a lot of money, considerably more than all the Big Five combined.

On the one hand, “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, &. nor yet riches to men of understanding.” (Ecclesiastes, 9:11). But that's probably the way to bet.

JAMES LARUE writes, speaks, and consults on the future of libraries. He can be contacted at jlarue@jlarue.com.

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Following the Money

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