After a seven-year run, the RELX Group has given up its title as the world’s largest book publisher, displaced by ThomsonReuters. The Canadian-based legal and professional publisher had a solid 2024, with revenue rising 6%, to $6.43 billion. After a flat 2023, sales at RELX slipped slightly in 2024, falling about 1%, to $6.2 billion for the STM and legal publisher.
This year’s top 10 publisher list also includes a new addition, as McGraw Hill returns. The educational and professional publisher had been excluded for a number of years when its private equity owners refused to provide any financial data. But in July, MH returned to the public markets and according to its prospectus, the company had total sales in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2025 of $2.10 billion, up 7% from fiscal 2024. The performance was good enough to put the publisher in seventh place on the ranking.
Rounding out the top 10 is a mix of trade, professional/STM, and educational publishers. Bertelsmann, with its educational publishing activities augmenting its large trade business as owner of Penguin Random House, was the third largest book publisher last year with the bulk of its revenue generated by PRH.
Lagardère’s publishing arm, Hachette Livre, was the world’s second largest trade publisher and sixth largest overall with total 2024 sales of just under $3 billion. HarperCollins was the third trade publisher to make the top 10 cut with its revenue from the fiscal year ended June 30, 2024 rising to just under $2.1 billion.
Rank Publishing Company Country 2024 Revenue ($ in millions) 2023 Revenue ($ in millions) 1 Thomson Reuters U.S. $6,426 2 RELX Group (Reed Elsevier) UK/NL/US $6,197 3 Bertelsmann Germany $6,066 4 Pearson U.K. $4,446 5 Wolters Kluwer Netherlands 6 Hachette Livre (Lagardère Publishing) France 7 McGraw-Hill Education (Incl. McGrawHill Global Education & School Group) U.S. 8 Hitotsubashi Group Japan 9 HarperCollins U.S. 10 Springer Nature Germany 11 Wiley U.S. 12 Phoenix Publishing and Media Company China 13 Informa U.K. 14 Holtzbrinck Germany 15 Scholastic U.S. 16 Cengage Learning Holdings II LP U.S. 17 Cambridge University Press U.K. 18 Klett Germany 19 China South Publishing & Media Group Co. Ltd (ZhongNan) China $1,234 $1,272 20 Kodansha Ltd Japan 21 Grupo Planeta Spain 22 Kadokawa Publishing (Kadokawa Shoten) Japan 23 Oxford University Press U.K. 24 China Publishing Group Corporation China 25 Editis SAS France