The 2023 edition of the Global 50 Publishing Ranking is a story of marketplaces that comes with a few twists, says Rüdiger Wischenbart, author of the annual report on publishing markets and business performance.
Data is extensive on the world’s largest publishers, yet insufficient for the nontraditional self-publishing market. And while books remain a dominant format, reading and discussing stories, as well as the IP generated from books, have become integrated in consumers’ experiences and on publishers’ spreadsheets.
The business year covered in the Global 50 report – 2022 – was a remarkably strong one. As in past years, the top 10 companies account for well over half of the combined top 50 turnover.
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However, consolidation finally met regulatory resistance in 2022, when a US court ruling blocked Penguin Random House’s takeover bid for Simon & Schuster.
Most important for an exhaustive accounting of turnover and trends in publishing is not what is included in this Global 50 Publishing Ranking, but what is not covered.
“The companies leading that market segment are not sharing any figures. We know Amazon is not sharing figures of what they’re earning from their publishing activities,” he tells me.
“I received estimates from different sources saying all the royalties that Amazon is supposed to be paying to self-published authors is around $200 million to $250 million per month. If you put that together, we have Amazon among the top 10 publishers.”
Wischenbart has published the Global 50 report since 2007. He believes the high-level, aggregated data should matter to all publishers, including the hundreds that don’t make the list.
“I can explain it in a very simple way. If you want to grow vegetables or whatever – cabbages – you can sit in your backyard and do fantastic tomatoes and cabbages and apple trees for yourself and go to the village market and sell this, go home, be happy, and that’s it. No need to be interested in the rest. You can, however, also realize, ‘Wait a moment, I can learn from what others are doing.’ And when there is really a transformation going on, learning new tricks is perhaps a very, very important idea to survive.”