The Global 50 Publishing Ranking 2024 provides a deep dive into today’s international book industry, using many of the world’s leading publishers as examples. The companies listed generate over 60 billion euros in revenue – more than half of the global publishing market value.

Since its first edition in 2007, the Global 50 Publishing Ranking has provided a comprehensive and in-depth annual overview of the global book business, with a ranking of the industry leaders, analysis of key trends and strategic developments, and detailed company profiles, rich with key data on financials, mergers and acquisitions, structural business developments such as changes in top management, corporate restructuring, and digital and AI-related innovations.

The report reflects surprising continuities and profound shifts in an industry that is experiencing highly dynamic consolidation as well as transformative forces that are radically reshaping business and distribution models for consumer books, educational materials, and scholarly and professional information services.

The Global 50 Publishing Ranking is researched by Ruediger Wischenbart Content and Consulting and published by leading international book industry publications, including Publishers Weekly (USA), The Bookseller (UK), Livres Hebdo (France), dpr Digital Publishing Report (Germany) and Bookdao (China). 

The Ranking is supported by Bookwire.

Today, book publishing has become a true part of the global content business. Yet books have retained a unique quality because publishing has created the most diverse manifestations of what can be neatly summed up by those 4 letters – B O O K:

Books can be printed on paper, listened to on a smartphone, packaged as an educational course, subscribed to as a globally branded academic journal, or snacked on as a serialized animated story. Books are embraced by audiences in multiple formats, physical or digital, picked up in a bookstore or on an online platform, presented by a small but highly creative independent press or by a global publishing conglomerate.

The Publishing Ranking 2024 documents and analyses this industry in a comprehensive global perspective.