Largest trade publisher

The largest trade publisher is Penguin Random House, a multinational company with its headquarters in New York City, USA. According to the 2020 edition of the Global 50 Ranking of the Publishing Industry, an annual report compiled by Livres Hebdo and Ruediger Wischenbart Content and Consulting, Penguin Random House posted revenues of €3.371 billion ($3.78 billion) for the 2019 financial year.

The publishing industry is dominated by three main sectors. They are trade publishing, which sells general-interest fiction and non-fiction to consumers through the retail book trade; Scientific, Technical and Medical publishing (known by the acronym STM), which sells specialist books, journals and information services to industry and academia; and education, which sells textbooks course materials and assessment services to schools and higher education institutions.

Penguin Random House (PRH) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. It was created in 2013 when Bertelsmann acquired a 53% stake in Penguin and merged it with Random House (which the company had owned since 1998) to create a new mega-publisher. Bertelsmann has since purchased the remaining 47% of the shares in the company. The creation of PRH transformed the "Big Six" trade publishers into the "Big Five", with the new company bar far the largest. The other members of the big five (as of September 2021) are Hachette Livres, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and MacMillan. (Simon & Schuster is currently for sale, and will likely be merged with one of its competitors.)

PRH publishes 70,000 digital and 15,000 print titles every year, and employs more than 10,000 people. As is common for the trade publishing industry, the company is composed of around 300 of creatively independent "imprints", which each maintain their own portfolio of titles.