In 2003 I bought a t-shirt that on the front said “Fuck Bush” in a surprisingly cheery font and on the back had a two-column list of 24 corporations: “Fuck Exxon-Mobil, Fuck Coca-Cola, Fuck Starbucks…” When I wore it to protests no one ever stopped me to ask me why Nike or Disney were on the list. After all, the Left is usually very good at analyzing and critiquing capital, showing us where the money is and what it means for massive corporations to wield extraordinary power. From Big Pharma to Big Energy, Big Retail, Big Agriculture, and Big Media, both academics and activists can usually name the largest of our corporate enemies in each industry and at least two or three of their corporate crimes.

Back of “Fuck Bush” t-shirt.

Back of “Fuck Bush” t-shirt.

But the usual list of the Left’s corporate enemies, just like the list that was on my t-shirt, never includes multinational book publishing corporations. Lefties generally give Big Book a free pass. As politically savvy consumers grapple with overlapping calls for boycotts and buycotts, it seems like a good time to talk about this blind spot.

When we talk about Big Book we’re mostly talking about the “Big Five.” These are the top five trade publishers in the world (“trade,” in the publishing industry, means not educational or academic publishing but books aimed at the general reader).

The “Big Five” publishing houses—Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Penguin Random House—wield enormous global power. These multinational corporations control about 80 percent of the English-language trade publishing market. As Vox reported in 2022, “The big publishers are now so big, with such extensive backlists and such deep pockets, that it’s nearly impossible to compete with them at scale.” In the US, Big Five–published books make up more than 80 percent of the titles on bestsellers lists. They dominate the book market in the UK, Canada, and Australia. The top four of the Big Five also publish in more than 15 additional languages and sell licensing rights in every other language. In most languages, translations from English make up a surprising number of newly published books and these translations are most likely to have originated at one of the Big Five publishers.

The academic and educational versions of Big Book—Pearson, Thomson-Reuters, Wiley, McGraw-Hill, Oxford University Press, and others—make huge profits from exercising far too much control of academic and textbook publishing. These companies, along with their much smaller scholarly counterparts, shape what students read and discuss and determine which academic work gets a big audience and which academic work ends up padding the back of the catalogue. No one should downplay the importance of corporate and neoliberal influences on educational and academic publishing, but here I’ll focus on non-fiction trade publishing, where ideas from both within and beyond academia are sold to the broadest and largest readership.

As the second-largest publisher in the world, with operations in 15 countries and more than 120 publishing imprints, HarperCollins had sales of US$2.09 billion in 2023. The “About Us” page of the HarperCollins website points out to potential readers that HarperCollins is the house of “Mark Twain, the Brontë sisters, J.R.R. Tolkien, Zora Neale Hurston, Martin Luther King Jr., Gabriel García Márquez, George R.R. Martin, C.S. Lewis, Maurice Sendak, Margaret Wise Brown, and many more.” It fails to mention that HarperCollins is also a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Penguin Random House (PRH, formed when Penguin and Random House merged in 2013) is the biggest of the Big Five, with “operations in more than 20 countries across six continents” and more than 300 imprints and brands. Last year, PRH reported sales of US$2.53 billion in the first half of 2024, up 8.5 percent from the same period the previous year, selling “nearly 35 million more books.” This success was attributed in part to audiobook sales and the January acquisition of Hay House, which added €35 million to PRH revenue.

We should of course be concerned about the concentrated control of any industry, but it’s especially concerning to see just five corporations control an industry that has so much power over knowledge production and culture. This was the reasoning behind a US federal judge’s decision to block PRH’s attempt to purchase Simon & Schuster in 2022. The decision, he said, “protects vital competition for books and is a victory for authors, readers, and the free exchange of ideas.… The proposed merger would have reduced competition, decreased author compensation, diminished the breadth, depth, and diversity of our stories and ideas, and ultimately impoverished our democracy.”

But a closer look at the Big Five shows that it’s more than just market dominance we need to worry about.

PRH is wholly owned by German multinational Bertelsmann—one of the world’s largest media companies. In 2002 Bertelsmann was forced to acknowledge its conduct during the Nazi era and its later attempts to cover up the truth: the Bertelsmann family patriarch, Heinrich Mohn, “had belonged to a circle of supporters who had donated money to the SS.” Furthermore, “far from resisting the Nazis, as it once claimed, Bertelsmann used its ties with the regime to transform itself from a provincial Lutheran printing company into a mass-market publisher.” Mohn produced cheap, popular war adventure........

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