Publishing industry

The publishing industry had an unexpectedly good year in 2020, despite the many challenges created by the pandemic. In the essay below, Hachette Book Group CEO Michael Pietsch uses lessons from last year to make some educated guesses about where the industry may be heading in the near term.

When the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies released its final industrywide sales report for 2020 last month, it showed another basically flat year, with sales of $25.71 billion, down 0.2% compared to 2019. The small decline was in keeping with the overall pattern over the past five years.  Read more

It doesn't sound like a Pulitzer winner, but "U.S. v. Bertelsmann SE, 21-cv-02886" is a cracking read in the niche genre of antitrust litigation. This is the U.S. Department of Justice's surprise lawsuit against Penguin Random House's $2.2 billion agreement to buy rival publisher Simon & Schuster almost a year ago.

This year, I found the spring television upfronts oddly exciting. A lot is changing in the media landscape, so much that I have trouble keeping up. Plus, as you all know, my summer was filled with moving and a boatload of deadlines.  Read more

Anyone who follows publishing knows that it loves to celebrate a disruptor. Disruptor is a label thrown at anything new, and publishing is unusually easy to disrupt because it is particularly slow to change.  Read more