Big Four (book publishing)

The Big Four are the four biggest English-language book publishing companies. Sometimes, the term is also used to refer to the Big Four academic publishers.

Big Four book publishers

• Simon & Schuster (a subsidiary of CBS Corporation)
• HarperCollins (a subsidiary of NewsCorp)
• Penguin Random House (a subsidiary of Bertelsmann and Pearson)
• Hachette Livre

Three of these four companies have their headquarters in New York City.

Big Four academic publishers

The four largest academic publishers own around 30% of all peer-reviewed journals:^[1]

• Elsevier (3,057 journals)
• Springer Science+Business Media (2,987 journals)
• John Wiley & Sons (2,339 journals)
• Taylor & Francis, the academic division of Informa (2,105 journals)

References

1. Richard Van Noorden: "Nature owner merges with publishing giant" in Nature, 15 January 2015