The Global 50 International Publishing Ranking 2021 is ready for free download at www.wischenbart.com/ranking.com

55 leadling publishing groups worldwide in consumer books, educational, scientific and professional, listed by revenue from publishing activities, plus a detailed analysis of trends and company profiles with key data.

The Global 50 publishing ranking is updated every year since 2007, and published in cooperation with Bookdao (China), buchreport (Germany), Livres Hebdo (France) and Publishers Weekly (USA).

Sponsored by BOD and Bookwire.

Wednesday, 20 October 2021, 14.00 to 15.00 CET

The Global 50 CEO Talk 2021 will investigate deep transformative shifts that currently re-define much of the international book business, notably the strong push in mergers and acquisitions, and the consumer centric business strategies with two pre-eminent guest speakers: New York based investment banker Robin Warner of Oaklin DeSilva+Philips, and Klaus Driever of Munich based Allianz Group, one of the leading integrated financial services providers worldwide.

Having closed more than 50 transactions focused on trade publishing, edtech and education information services, and healthcare to companies that include Amazon, Scribd, IPG (Independent Publishers Group), Oracle, Wiley and Macmillan, Robin Warner will analyze recent consolidation perspectives for the international book industry.

As a digital expert with experience in insurance as well as in in publishing and book retail, Klaus Driever will talk about remarkably similar patterns of digital change across industries.

Building on the new “Global 50 Ranking of the International Publishing Industry 2021”, the editors of Bookdao (China), buchreport (Germany), Livres Hebdo (France) and Publishers Weekly (US). The hybrid event in partnership with the Frankfurt Book Fair and with ReBoot Books will be moderated by Rüdiger Wischenbart.

The CEO Talk will shed light on a wave of major mergers and acquisitions is re-shaping the global business of books. Bertelsmann’s Penguin Random House is acquiring iconic US publisher Simon and Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is picked up by Harper Collins, and Workman is taken over by French Hachette – which in turn has been viewed by the other large media group in France, Vivendi, in what is expected by observers to grow into an acquisition bid at some point next year.

The dynamics are not at all limited to the big consumer book houses. Finnish Sanoma, a specialist in digital education, has acquired the respective activities of Spanish Santillana. In Germany meanwhile, a staggering process of consolidation continues with the largest book retail chain integrating smaller regional players throughout the country. And in Great Britain, Waterstones’ James Daunt has announced new shop openings for next year.

The context in which the earlier invitation to Hachette Livre had been made has changed, and therefore the programming of the CEO talk has evolved, in agreement between the organizers of the event and Hachette Livre.

A cooperation of four leading trade media outlets, the CEO Talk traditionally features the Global 50 Ranking of the International Publishing Industry, which is researched by Rüdiger Wischenbart Content and Consulting, and has been updated every year since 2007, currently representing around 50 companies that each report revenues from publishing of over €150 million. The Global 50 Ranking is sponsored by Bookwire (www.bookwire.de )

At Frankfurter Buchmesse, the CEO Talk is a long-established tradition.

The full Global 50 Ranking will be available at www.wischenbart.com/ranking and the participating publishing publications.

About Klaus Driever and Allianz Group: Klaus is a successful and experienced digital entrepreneur. Already in the 90s he founded his first digital startups and brought companies like buecher.de (Germany) and bol.com (Netherlands) to success. As editior-in-chief and Managing director, he worked for leading companies in the media, retail and book publishing industry like Hubert Burda Media, ProSieben and Verlagsgruppe Weltbild. After holding position as CEO of the direct insurance Allsecur AG, Klaus is currently responsible for the strategically relevant digital projects at Allianz Germany. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Freiburg University in Germany and is also Alumni of Trinity College Dublin. Klaus lives in Munich and is active in honorary capacity for InsurTechHub Munich (ITHM) and for BITKOM, Germany’s digital association representing more than 2.700 companies of the digital economy.

The Allianz Group is a global financial services provider with services predominantly in the insurance and asset management business. Over 100 million retail and corporate clients1 in more than 70 countries rely on our knowledge, global presence, financial strength and solidity. In fiscal year 2020 over 150,000 employees worldwide achieved total revenues of 140.5 billion euros and an operating profit of 10.8 billion euros. Allianz SE, the parent company, is headquartered in Munich, Germany. Source: en-2021-10-fact-sheet.pdf (allianz.com)

About the magazines and their editors participating at the Global 50 CEO Talk: Sanguo Cheng, founder and president of Bookdao (China), Lena Scherer, deputy editor-in-chief, buchreport (Germany), Fabrice Piault, editor-in-chief, Livres Hebdo (France), and Andrew Albanese, features editor, Publishers Weekly (US).

About ReBoot: ReBoot Books (www.rebootbooks.org) is a series of book industry and will be represented by Carlo Carrenho. Its sponsors include KNK (www.knk.com ) and BOD (www.BOD.com )

Contact: Rüdiger Wischenbart, founder and president Content and Consulting (Austria),  office@wischenbart.com

“Breaks, but no breakdowns: The pandemic and its impact on the international book business” reads the headline of a new preview of the Global 50 World Publishing Ranking 2021.

Download your free copy of this White Paper at Preview Global 50 2021
This ‘Preview’ to the next Global 50 looks specifically at the following topics:
– The impact of the pandemic on exemplary leading publishing corporations;
– The drivers behind initially unexpected positive market developments;
– The acceleration of business innovation triggered during the pandemic, with
special highlights on digital, audiobooks and subscription models;
– The opening gap in market developments between selected European countries;
– The ongoing surge in competition, driving industry consolidation, new alliances
and powerful impulses from neighboring media sectors;
– The transformative dynamics of the expanding “network and platform” economy
as it reshapes book consumption.

The complete Global 50 World Publishing Ranking will be released by the end of August 2021 at www.wischenbart.com/ranking.

We thank our sponsors of the Global 50, namely BOD, Bookwire, knk and Plureos for their generous and ongoing support.

More digital book consumption, new audiences, a sustainable upswing:

2020 was a breakthrough year for digital consumer books, bringing new opportunities in reaching new audiences and an expansion in e-book and audiobook consumption in subscription, e-lending and streaming models.

The Digital Consumer Book Barometer provides detailed insights and analysis based on solid and exclusive market data in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, French speaking Canada, Brazil and Mexico.

Lockdowns, home office and home schooling have boosted digital consumption of books across all formats and channels, opening new opportunities to the book business, with similar developments across all markets and segments.

Sales soared, triggered in spring 2020 at first by the impact of pandemic restrictions. But soon, after a short lull in summer, the trend turned out to be a sustainable game changer for the entire digital book business.

One of the major surprises was the gain in popularity for subscription services and related models of continuous consumption, as in digital libraries or audiobook streaming from music services. In both German language markets as in Brazil, the increase reached massive gains for subscription and e-elending year-over-year from 2019 to 2020.

Good news for traditional publishers operating in the digital fields is that price levels could by and large be kept stable over the past 5 years in most countries, including Italy, Germany, or French speaking Canada. In more volatile markets such as Mexico or Brazil, the overall average price level went lightly down, but publishers found out, as good news, that consumers embraced not only cheap thrills, but were prepared to pay even more for high quality titles.

Overall, after ebooks having been losing some appreciation by book market commentators lately, a turnaround with sustainable gains seems to be the outcome of 2020, as is shown by the uniquely granular data analysis in this report.

The Digital Consumer Book Barometer, started by Ruediger Wischenbart Content and Consulting in 2018, is regularly updated and dwells on real sales data provided by leading international digital distributors and aggregators, notably Bookwire (German language markets, Spain, Latin America), Demarque (French speaking Canada), edigita (Italy), Libranda (Spain and Latin America), and Readbox (German language).

Download the Digital Consumer Book Barometer here.

In case you have missed the recent online debate at ReBoot Books on April 21st, find here below some key talking points from the discussions – and a 16 minute video excerpt from the panel “In search of the final consumer“.

As a registered member of ReBoot, you can even view the full three sessions in the ReBoot Box!

The day-to-day challenges under pandemic market conditions for a publishing company are adding up to a long list, said Planeta’s CEO Jesús Badenes in his opening statement at the ReBoot online debate on April 21, 2021.

The business has become more complex, with smaller average print runs and other titles gaining in popularity as book buyers’ references changed. For the head of the largest publishing group in the Spanish language, the key to an efficient management response can be boiled down to a four-letter word: Data.

Having the right data at your finger tips allows to better manage the inventory, finding the right balance between increasing digital products, and using flexible print-on-demand solutions for physical books, which helps to lower returns and make ecommerce more customer friendly.

This allowed Gerd Robertz, CEO of German BOD – a provider of both PoD and of author & self-publishing solutions, and a sponsor of ReBoot – to follow up seemlessly. These same solutions are available not just to big corporations – Planeta’s turnover tops that of New York based Simon & Schuster, or French Editis group. Even small independent publishers or a self-published author can provide the same convenience in fast delivery, and harvest resulting data insights, to develop a strong and targetd marketing.

Publishers and retailers must “build a customer journey“, added Jason Spanos, Chief Revenue Officer at KNK, an internationally leading software provider to the book business, and a sponsor of ReBoot. During the pandemic, KNK particularly focused, with a newly established, dedicated team, on monitoring how quickly customer engagement and habits were changing. “We simulated meetings at libraries, or in coffeeshops, or now in their online social exchanges” for learning to quickly adapt to new patterns of engagement.

Gaining data, organizing them within one company, or even sharing data more openly that what is common today triggered the subsequent lively debate between both speakers and experienced book professionals in the audience.

Today, said technologist Matt Turner, people interact digitally in order to then buy physical books – or opt for entertainment media instead of a book, like series or games in streaming TV.

Thus publishers must learn to better understand their own products and, as Anne Bergmann of the Federation of European Publishers added, explore the co-existence between sales and streaming services for e-books and digital audiobooks, in order to avoid mistakes that had done great harm to the music and the audiovisual services a decade ago.

Companies need to integrate workflows and data flows within their organization, and not just look at data gained through distributors and retailers, argued Brian O’Leary of the New York based industry think tank BISG.

How all this can be brought to fruition in the day-to-day company life was richly illustrated by Julie MacKay from the American subscription platform Scribd, Peta Nightingale from the British author services platform Bookouture, which had been acquired by Hachette, as well as Rafaela Pechansky of the Brazilian reading community TAG.

How well established in innovative forms to connect and network are seen in the trade of rights and licenses will be summarized in a separate blog post in a few days.

You can’t wait to access the full debates in video recordings – and join us also at the next live event on June 15, 2021, then you should become a full member of ReBoot. Registration is simple at https://rebootbooks.org/

5 renowned book industry organizations team up, with support from Creative Europe, to disseminate market insights and practical learnings about novel approaches in publishing.

Apply now for the SIDT innovation training modules

The SIDT initiative – standing for “Sustaining and Innovating cultural Diversity in literary Translations” – introduces a pilot project for professional trainings to small and medium sized independent publishers, distributors, and retailers across Europe.

These actors often spearhead translations of new literary voices across Europe. But in an increasingly competitive market for cultural media, including books, making such cultural diversity work commercially, too, has become a challenge to many stakeholders.

Literature needs to be catered to multiple niche audiences, in print and digital, across various distribution channels, and marketed through dedicated communities of readers. This requires venturing into innovative business and delivery practices, driven by digital tools and platforms.

Overall, 4 different training modules of around 10 to 12 hours each will be offered to interested practitioners, first between April and June 2021, and then a second time in the autumn of this year. Topics will range from “digitization of the publishing workflow”, and “radical innovation” approaches, to “user-centric marketing” and “new business models”, notably in publishing operations specializing in translated fiction.

Each module will introduce a group of around 20 to 25 trainees to market overviews and practical case studies, elements of innovative business practices and hands-on group work. Experienced industry practitioners will act as trainers, together with professional moderators.

Participation in the modules is free but subject to submitting an application with a detailed questionnaire and a motivational letter, available (with more details on the project and the modules) at www.sidt-books.eu; the project management board will retain the final decision on applications.

SIDT is a joint initiative of Beletrina Academic Press, Ljubljana, Slovenia, the Federation of European Publishers, Brussels, Belgium, the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, Madrid, Spain, Lietuvos Leidėjų Asociacija (Lithuanian Publishers’ Association), Vilnius, Lithuania, and Rüdiger Wischenbart Content and Consulting, Vienna, Austria, as a project coordinator.

The project is co-funded under the Creative Europe programme by the European Commission.

Contact and information:
SIDT Books
info@sidt-books.org

The season’s first workshop in the “ReBoot: Books, Business and Reading” on 25 Feb 2021 took off with promises of a wild ride between some countries and segments where the book trade significantly expanded, driven by an increase in reading, while other markets and segments of the industry had to confront loss and swings in consumer habits.

Print book sales in Germany, Austria and Switzerland 2011 to 2020 (data by MediaControl, analysis Ruediger Wischenbart Content and Consulting).

In Sweden, publishers recorded gains in revenue of 8.7% in 2020 – and a stunning surge of +21.5% in (mostly digital) units. For the first time digital overtook physical sales, and most of digital turnover was earned through audiobook subscriptions.

The USA saw 9% more copies shipped, while revenues stayed flat with +0.8%. The real drama however required to go into the details, as online sales surged by +43% in 2020, bringing print books up +8.2% in revenue, and ebooks +12.6%, while physical bookstores, drowned by -28.3%.

Germany (-2.3% in book revenue) and France (-4.5%), the two usually boringly robust European markets saw each an up and down along the Covdid-19 year, shaped by lookdowns and closures of bookstores, followed by bold interim recoveries, praised as proof for the resilience of the book sector. But again, a deep rift opened, setting apart the overall market performance from a much more challenged brick and mortar retail sector, where turnover dropped by -8.7% and unit sales even by -12%.

In Poland, unit sales were remarkably robust, but returns fell off quickly, as heavy discounting led to price wars. E-commerce moved mainstream even in countries with a particularly low digital penetration, like Greece.

Overall, the ReBoot workshop provided data and analysis on some 20 different territories all over Europe and the Americas, covering namely Argentina, Austria, Brazil, China, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, Turkey, UK, US, and by industry segment fiction and nonfiction, as compared to children and young adult, as well as by formats and sales channels – notably print, ebooks, audiobooks, e-commerce, and subscriptions, as well as digital library lending.

In many countries publishers found themselves in a stronger position than retailers. Pandemic sales hit hardest the big chain bookstores, while giving some advantages to small independents and, of course, online (or omni channel) shops. Digital library loans soared. Backlist titles gained ground, while front-list – put aside a few blockbusters – saw their share in decline. And in many parts of the industry, new alliances and new fields for experimentation opened.

We are grateful to all participants, and in particular to those sharing their insights and learnings, including Andrew Albanese (US), Johanna Brinton (UK), Carlo Carrenho (BR/SE), Giacomo D’Angelo (IT), Sonia Draga (PL), Michalis Kalamaras (GR), Thad McIlroy (US), Gerson Ramos (BR), Enrico Turrin (BE/EU), and Burcu Ürsin (TR).

A complete video recording of the session, and presentations with rich data and detail, will be made available to all registered ReBoot members in the ReBoot Box.

Register now at www.rebootbooks.org to get your pass offering access to the Box and to the next Reboot events on April 21^st and June 15.

We thank our sponsors Media Control and the Austrian Ministry of Culture for their crucial support.

ReBoot 2021: The Repair Shop. Assessing the damage, and fixing it.

After a widely received first season in fall 2020, with four Preparations Workshops and a 6-hour state of the industry debate on October 13 – attended by 200 experienced industry leaders from 28 countries in a unique mix of heads of worldwide corporations and small local innovators –, it is time to move on.

In the first half year of 2021, ReBoot proposes a systematic assessment of the damage, based on a rich survey of multiple data sources and intertwined with a structured set of workshops, with the goal of comparing lessons, experiences, and proposed solutions.

ReBoot will focus on how authors, publishers, suppliers, and retailers:

• Operate in highly dynamic markets, defined by changing consumer habits and mounting competition for consumers’ attention and budgets;
• Manage seamlessly multiple formats, business and distribution models, while new entrants from other media industries approach the same audiences;
• Learn to directly target consumers, build sustainable communities around more granular audiences, and attract the best creative talent for books and readers.

The Repair workshop calendar foresees three units of 2-4 hours in the first half year of 2021:

• 25 FEB 2021: Assessing the damage, and identifying the key lessons for looking forward;
• 21 APR 2021: How to fix what is broken, and who can offer the best tools for that aim;
• 15 JUN 2021: Navigating to new islands and sailing with the winds of change.

You can subscribe to all three ReBoot units plus get permanent access to the ReBoot Box, which contains rich and relevant documentation plus video recordings of all sessions, at a flat rate of € 149, or buy tickets for each unit separately at € 99.

We invite sponsors and partners to engage with ReBoot on a continuous basis, with customized cooperation packages starting at € 5,000 for 1HY2021.

Find out about all details, and register right away at www.rebootbooks.org.

Follow us for updates on Twitter at @rebootbooks

You can recap ReBoot in fall 2020 in 3 blogposts:

• Workshops 01 and 02 (on consumer habits and on hybrid publishing here)
• Workshops 03 and 04 (on supply chain and on bookselling here)
• ReBoot: The Conference here.

At BookExpo in May 2018, a CEO roundtable with, from left, the Association of American Publishers’ Maria A. Pallante, Macmillan’s John Sargent, Simon & Schuster’s Carolyn Reidy, and Penguin Random House’s Markus Dohle. Photo by Porter Anderson, Publishing Perspectives, used by permission

At BookExpo 2018, a publishing “CEO  roundtable” hosted by the Association of American Publishers‘ Maria A. Pallante, had 3 heads of New York Big Five publishing corporations debating the future of the industry. I don’t recall details, but am certain that all three speakers were upbeat.

Two years and a bit later, Carolyn Reidy of Simon and Schuster has passed away, John Sargent has quit Macmillan and Holtzbrinck, and only Markus Dohle is still in his position as CEO of Penguin Random House, and announced just a week ago that his group would pick up Simon and Schuster. Another major American trade and educational publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt stands for sale.

And now, BookExpo, together with its consumer sibling BookCon, the by far largest industry gathering in the US, and the States’ only public platform for welcoming international publishers and other vendors of the book business, has been “retired“, as the press release of Reed Exhibition, the parent company, camouflaged their decision of pulling the plug. (See the summary in Publishing Perspectives)

My personal book fair calender for 2020 saw me packing for London in April, and shortly thereafter for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I was considering Leipzig, and would have observed closely Bologna and Paris from afar. Already, I did not plan to attend BookExpo in New York in late May, as I couldn’t anticipate any business for me at the event. Beijing in late August was still undecided. In fall, I obviously planned for Frankfurt, and then Ljubljana in November. I was considering Guadalajara, as my interest in Latin America had seriously increased lately, while working for Cerlalc, the UNESCO partnering organization based in Bogota, Colombia.

None of these events would have any physical presence or attendees, it turned out.

Instead, together with a few friends like Carlo Carrenho and Klaus-Peter Stegen, we decided as early as late April to launch our own, purely digital conference format, ReBoot: Books, Business and Reading, which eventually took place with 4 workshops in September and a 6 hour marathon series of industry debates on October 13, 2020, which normally would have been Frankfurt’s opening day.

I summarize these details not out of nostalgia, nor anticipating any “return to normal” in 2021. Yet I am an optimist. I am confident that the vaccine will have a – hopefully broad, and not limited to the rich countries and mega cities only – impact on our lives and businesses.

I am fairly confident that the book business overall will cope, and adapt – which is synonymous to ‘deeply transform‘ – in the course of the pandemic. But I am also convinced that the same may not necessarily apply to book fairs. At least those in North America and in large parts of Europe, plus Japan. For all the rest of the world, this is a different story, which I’ll address another time.

There surely will be industry gatherings in the future, with actual visitors, with some kind of exhibits, and certainly with receptions and parties, probably as soon as in early summer or fall of next year. But I would wish to be a fly on the wall when a sales representative of Frankfurt or London will call up the person in charge for marketing budgets at Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins – or, very similarly, at Planeta, Bonnier, or German Bastei Lübbe in spring 2021, in the ambition to sell some significant booth space. ‘Best of luck‘, as those hard nosed sales reps would say.

All the big, and many medium sized companies have their finance people right now spending hours and days in home offices and zoom calls to figure out how to slash office space and rent, shift resources into a more de-centralized model of organization, invest – hopefully – heavily in streamlining their workflow and otimize their processes (ERP companies, but also Salesforce/Slack and other will further expand), AND they will be, at the front end of their operations, all about  ‘the consumer‘.

“D2C” – Direct-to-Consumer will be the magic formular for 2021, I am sure.

These moves will fairly quickly result in shifts in companies’ internal power balances, hopefully by just even more strongly separating what, on a day-to-day basis, editorial does, and what the ‘back office‘ does with what editorial is proposing to them – or in return, by drastically re-framing the set-up in which editorial is supposed to do their work.

That swing does not necessarily clip the aisles of good editors in theit creativity. But it may rewrite the overall playbook of book publishing.

To give just one example: Anything more ‘niche‘ may be handed over to some ‘special arms‘ of the organization, or be delegated into new (or already existing) ‘author platforms‘ – as in publisher + Wattpad cooperation deals.

In less fortunate organizations, which will be around too, it will be a new regime that hardly breathes that old air of sniffing out that new genial literary hero who might be a winner of some award half a writing life later.

These are, of course, just a few guesses. But for traditinal book fairs, they carry a few clear lessons. First of all, there is little reason for publishers to spend a fortune on renting huge booth space, add more money for flashy cusomized stand constructions, and send over hald the company staff for a week.

Fairs will be closer to festivals on the one hand, and on the other hand to the more operational, small-table plus hotel-bar-and-dinner-separée type of the rights business. In addition, the ‘industry talks‘ will be hybrid at best, and much debate will be within closed settings– e.g. behind corporate community walls, rather than public.

For the ever more pressing opening up, embracing new ideas, interact with an ever growing number of new comeptition from new entrants and start-ups, this may become a huge problem. For letting in new company talent, the result may be a desaster, really endangering a necessary renewal of the professional book communities.

But, as an optimist, I see all these ‘problems’ mainly as bringing some transformative strains that we all have seen coming already before the virus struck, didn’t we?

With regard to BookExpo, Michael Cader now wrote in his Publishers’ Lunch: “The show itself had diminished for years.” So let’s move on, and make the best of it.

PS: David Unger, of Guadalajara FIL, commented in the Facebook group Publishing without borders: “Rudiger: for many years BEA was running itself into circles and into the ground. It had no identity and changed its focus and format sometimes twice a year. It cannot be compared to other international book fairs that have very clearly defined roles and focuses. I know you agree with me.”

This allowed me to specify, how I would differentiate between 3 types of international book fairs:

First and foremost, I have no clue what regulators will say about the purchase. This is not my turf. But I have a couple of observations on the underlying stories in the move of German Bertelsmann group, parent of Penguin Random House, picking up the 1924 founded book publishing jewel, Simon and Schuster, for $2.175 bn.

In terms of turnover, Simon and Schuster is relevant for Penguin Random House (PRH), but certainly not a game changer.  But the relevance lies underneath that surface perhaps.

#1 An ironic tale

All the sales reports and revenue banked from John Bolton‘s “The Room Where It Happened“, Bob Woodward‘s ” Rage“, and Mary L. Trump‘s “Too Much and Never Enough” will be consolidated, together with earnings from Barack Obama‘s “A Promised Land” in 1745 Broadway, New York City, and then reported to Gütersloh (around 100,000 inhabitants), North Rhine-Westphalia, South-West of Teutoburg Forest, Germany, home of Bertelsmann.

Speaking symbolics, we may see here a reflection on the loss of American supremacy in the globalized cultural footprint.

This does not mean, of course, that some obscure people from German backwaters would direct what is fit to be printed in New York City, certainly not. Even without Simon and Schuster, German PRH revenue accounts for a mere 7% of PRH global, and editorial decisions are made in New York, not Gütersloh, already for many years. But no US power game may have an upper hand under such an umbrella, when already in 2020, well before the deal, any efforts failed in challenging Simon and Schuster’s controversial books on American politics.

So, ‘Simon’ is adopted by ‘Hans’ in a way, rather than married, but Hans and Simon have each a colorful, adult persona already, besides Hans’ clear German roots.

Much more relevant is the second point.

#2 A global strategic bet

Since German Bertelsmann acquired Random House, for $1.8bn in 1998 – back then, as much as today, the world’s largest consumer book publisher, and a strategic expansion that signaled “globalization” to the cozy, national emporiums of books and reading -, a lot of mergers and acquisitions and restructurings took place in the global book business. But the odd riddle of what is the path to success remains unsolved:

Is that consolidation about scale – having more books, more authors, more markets under one company’s clout – or is it about scope – controlling books plus movies plus games plus whatever other form or format for the best exploitation of (‘authors’, or ‘creators’) intelectual property?

Not long ago, the French media empire of Vivendi acquired the country’s second largest book publisher, Editis, in the clear ambition of reading these books first hand, for subsequent cross-media exploitation. Author platforms, from Chinese Tencent Literature to Canadian/global Wattpad launched ‘Studio’ divisions to do just this, turning stories into other formats. Netflix has developed multiple axes to lure (often book) authors to turn stories into TV formats.

Bertelsmann is clearly a multimedia behemoth, with a turnover of over 18 bnEUR coming from TV, books, magazines, music, education, services and print.

But PRH, under its current CEO Markus Dohle, has a 100 percent focus on – books. Fullstop. “A very happy Dohle told PW today was a ‘good day for books, book publishing, and reading.‘” (Publishers Weekly today)

Of course, Dohle includes under ‘books’ any format, print, ebook, audiobook, and distribution model (even as in the latter, he is more restrictive, when it comes to any all-in or digital lending offerings).

But strategically, not just in the actual acquisition of Simon and Schuster, but in a more long term view on consumers, Dohle’s is a bold bet.

Frankly, I like Dohle’s clear and bold stance (against my personal cross-media intuitions) – which is, by the way, mirrored by others throughout the industry internationally, which, by the way, is really under-reported.

Dohle argues that a book is a book and addresses a reader who is a reader (a clear cut target audience to adress – as opposed to any fluid other things). And, to give one example, by initiating right now a big initiative towards Latino reading audiences, in Spanish, Dohle turns this into a very inclusive – and not just exclusive white middle urban class strategy -, which is great!

I am more cautious though, and even deeply worried, how that bold stance of the global book market leader PRH can be translated into a viable formula, all the way down, to the lower levels in the global book and reading ecosystem. We need the many small and mid-sized independent ventures and platforms, beneath the corporations, and in the many small markets and the thematic niches, in order to maintain the diversity in what books – in whatever format – can offer to readers.

So perhaps the book as a “Jack of all trades” format, which can incorporate any story and any piece of knowledge to any audience anywhere, oddly needs at first a good craddle, to develop its many talents, and thereupon go beyond?

At this point, I have no ready made answer, but encourage thinking, and input, and initiatives on that fragile bottom of our industry.

For more details about Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster and the onging consolidation in global publishing, see the Global 50 World Ranking, a 260+ page report with facts, figures, 50 extensive company profiles and analysis, for free download at www.wischenbart.com/ranking – and subscribe to our newsletter to be updated on new research.

Addendum:

Source: Excerpt from Bertelsmann Annual Report, 2020, analysis by RWCC for this article.