This is an interesting sort of thing here. Its purpose is to show even when we think we have a choice, often, we don’t, and things are much more complicated than they seem. Acquisitions and mergers are literally impossible to keep track of, because they’re happening constantly. Some of these are important to some of us in greater or lesser degrees; for example, I’m not going to be buying a new car anytime soon, but it’s still interesting to know. The way I look at it is as if the individual companies start out and then are eaten by an amoeba which is always hungry. It goes around looking for other companies until it’s big enough to draw the attention of another even bigger organism, and the cycle repeats until it’s turned into a giant frog or, say, a penguin, surrounded by so many things it’s as though the holidays have come again and it’s eaten way too much.
The first one isn’t formatted into a pretty chart. I would have sworn I saw one once, I think in Writer’s Weekly. But it does get really big. One major difference, and the wonderful man who had the patience to put this together on his blog in 2010, so this isn’t on it because it just happened last year, is that Random House and Penguin merged, so now they’re the Big 5. I was surprised this was actually allowed to proceed, given how few big publishing houses there are left. And they have more imprints than these; dozens, if not a hundred or more. The other very nice thing that Scott Marlowe did was link the imprints, some of which may have changed (I have to confess I’ve been bad and haven’t checked them). I also like how he gives the early history of them, because those things are interesting to know. More about that after the publishing information.
Publishing’s Big 6: Who are they?
by @scottmarlowe 2/12/2010 1:02:00 PM
College football has the Big 12. The accounting industry has the Big 4. Publishing? The Big 6.
A lot of us are familiar with Macmillan due to their recent battle over eBook pricing. They’re one of the six. But who are the other five?
This post started as a quick look into just that, but then I thought maybe I’d also list a little bit of information about their imprints. Imprints are nothing more than trade names a publisher uses when publishing in a narrower field. Tor, for example, is an imprint of Macmillan that focuses on fantasy and science fiction. But as I started to dig into each of the Big 6’s imprint information I was completely overwhelmed by the sheer number. As you can see below, it borders on the ridiculous.
Therefore, the focus of this post is to just list out the major publishing houses along with some high level info about each. Their imprints have been relegated to a simple list with links so you can click-through to find out more information if you so desire.
Here they are.
Imprints include: Grand Central Publishing, Vision, Forever, Twelve, Business Plus, Wellness Central, 5 Spot, Springboard Press, Faith Words, Windblown Media, Center Street, Hachette Audio, Little, Brown and Company, Back Bay Books, Bulfinch, Reagan Arthur Books, Poppy, LB Kids, Orbit, Yen Press
Imprints include: Amistad, Avon, Avon A, Avon Inspire, Avon Red, Caedmon, Collins, Harper Business, Collins Design, Collins Living, Ecco, Eos, Harper Mass Market, Harper Paperbacks, Harper Perennial, HarperAudio, HarperCollins, HarperCollins e-Books, ItBooks, HarperLuxe, HarperOne, HarperStudio, Morrow Cookbooks, Rayo, William Morrow, Amistad, Eos, Greenwillow Books, HarperCollins Children’s Audio, HarperCollins Children’s Books, HarperFestival, HarperEntertainment, HarperTeen, HarperTrophy, Joanna Cotler Books, Julie Andrews Collection, Katherine Tegen Books, Laura Geringer Books, Rayo
3. Macmillan
Imprints include: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, FSG Hardcovers, FSG Paperbacks, Hill & Wang, Faber & Faber, First Second, Henry Holt & Co., Henry Holt Hardcovers, Henry Holt Paperbacks, Metropolitan Books, Times Books, Macmillan Audio, Behind the Wheel, Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, Picador, Quick and Dirty Tips, Scientific American, St. Martin’s Press, Minotaur Books, Thomas Dunne Books, Tor/Forge, Tor Books, Forge Books, Orb Books, Tor/Seven Seas, Bedford, Freeman and Worth, Bedford/St. Martin’s, W.H. Freeman, Worth Publishers, BFW High School, Hayden-McNeil, Palgrave Macmillan, Trade Books For Courses, FSG Books for Young Readers, Feiwel & Friends, Holt Books for Young Readers, Kingfisher, Roaring Brook, Priddy Books, Starscape/Tor Teen, Square Fish, Young Listeners, Macmillan Kids
Imprints include: Ace Books, Alpha Books, Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, Avery, Berkley Books, Dial Books for Young Readers, Dutton Books, Dutton Children’s Books, Firebird, Frederick Warne, Gotham Books, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, Grosset & Dunlap, HP Books, Hudson Street Press, Jove, NAL, Pamela Dorman Books, Penguin, The Penguin Press, Perigee Books, Philomel Books, Plume, Portfolio, Prentice Hall Press, Price Stern Sloan, Puffin Books, Razorbill, Riverhead, Sentinel, Speak, Tarcher, The Viking Press, Viking Books for Young Readers
5. Random House
Imprints include: Crown Trade Group, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Random House Publishing Group, RH Audio Publishing Group, Random House Children’s Books, RH Information Group, RH International, RH Large Print
Imprints include: Aladdin, Atheneum, Atria, Beach Lane Books, Folger Shakespeare Library, Free Press, Howard Books, Little Simon, Margaret K. McElderry Books, Paula Wiseman Books, Pimsleur, Pocket, Scribner, Simon & Schuster, Simon & Schuster Audio, Simon & Schuster BFYR, Simon Pulse, Simon Spotlight, Threshold, Touchstone/Fireside
I mentioned the history because it seems that so often the things around us don’t have a history. I just bought some Faber-Castell colored pencils, and they were celebrating their 250th anniversary. It’s still run in the family–8 generations now. That’s pretty cool.The next is Mega Corporations. This is all just for informational purposes, really. I may have personal feelings one way or another, but it’s not my place to tell someone else what to do. Unless it’s really, really just wrong. And buying a loaf of bread to feed your family isn’t wrong by any means. What did I read the other day? That the Snap Card for Oregon (our equivalent to food stamps) was lowered in November by $40 a month so now the average amount per month is $235. Some families get more. The food banks are flooded every week. It has been stated the recession is over. It isn’t over in Oregon. According to a USA Today article from December 4th, “Oregon is one of six states where 20% of the population is on food stamps.” Who, you wonder, are the other 5? “Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico and Louisiana.” The unemployment rate is 0.4% higher than the national average (7.3%). I had no intention of going off on that. It was the loaf of bread thing, I think.
10 Mega Corporations
The Illusion of Choice
Chart Via Reddit
Okay, you sort of need a magnifying glass for this one. I have to admit the only one I know anything about recently was Kraft’s purchase of Cadbury, who promised the employees and Peoples in Charge that they would keep things the same. Then they promptly closed one of the production companies and moved production to Poland. There’s more that happened after that. The whole history of the thing is pretty interesting, actually.
I was raised from as long as I can remember not to buy Nestle because of the issue of baby formula they produced and pushed on mothers to use instead of breast feeding, causing not only an unnecessary expense to the family but taking away a natural part of the child-rearing process. Not trying to start any sort of argument, but children are healthier if they’re breast fed. Why use a formula, which by definition is, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, “a list of the ingredients used for making something (such as a medicine or drink)” or “a milk mixture or substitute for feeding an infant” when the real source, not a formulated one, is right there? It always comes down to money.
There are only a few more of these horrific things, don’t worry. They are interesting, I think. Or maybe that’s just the nerd in me talking. The next one…oh, choices, choices (I really do have a choice, here). How about mass media, as that’s the way so many people get their information. I don’t watch TV. Some people think I’m crazy. I don’t know if I’m just a really bad time manager or generally inefficient sometimes, but I can’t manage to get done what I need to without watching TV.
Mass Media
Source: MediaChannel.org
These are smaller than I thought they’d be. Sigh. Maybe I need reading glasses to put over my progressives.
This one I keep almost forgetting. Probably because I’m broke and have had no cause to go to the bank lately. Plus they have those nifty little scanning deposit things, which it so much easier to enable someone who’s feeling agoraphobic from having to leave the house. Today’s society truly is set up in a way to…I don’t know if enable is too strong a word… I do have a Generalized Panic Disorder, without Agoraphobia, although I’m beginning to wonder if that’s not starting to change. No money, so why bother going out? I may as well save the gas in my car for when I need to go to doctor’s appointment’s or things like that. There are, of course, other reasons for going out, but I’m pretty much a loner and I haven’t heard from the people I know. I suppose that may be because I haven’t contacted them either. But yes, it does take a little more crowbar effort to get me out the door some days. So. Banks.
Bank Mergers
Mother Jones
Not quite as colorful and exciting as the others. I’ll put up the one for cars next, which does have some interesting little quirks in it. I’ll save the most colorful for last.
Car Company Family Tree
One thing I do have to say is that the new little Fiats running around are pretty cool. I have no need to prove my femininity by driving a monster truck with tires as tall as the roof as my Subaru. Or a pink Volkwagon Beetle. Or Bug, or squashed on the windshield, or whatever. I do think those are somewhat attractive, but the thing I think about cars, vehicles in general, is that they lack personality. I loved my 1987 Volvo 240D. A nasty commute from Sonoma County to Marin County in Northern California killed her transmission, so I have my now car, Fuschia, a burgundy Subaru. You don’t see many of them in Northern California, so I was shocked when I moved to Eugene and it seemed like it was nearly a requirement to own one to live here. It doesn’t even phase me to see one that looks just like mine anymore. Even the thrill of that is gone. But those little Fiats are cute. Fuschia can definitely carry a lot, though. It’s amazing how much you can cram into all those nooks and crannies, to the point when you shut the hatchback, it’s staying closed until you reach your destination, because you know it’s going to be like one of those snakes in a can and things will simply pop out when you open the door again. Cars all look so much alike now, as if designers strive to make them look the same, when they used to make them look distinctive. People may have mocked the Edsel, but I’d take one (in reliable running condition, that is). There’s one I pass, when I go out at a regular time, and it’s awesome. There are a lot of classic cars around this area. Personally, I really like Studebakers, Nash Metropolitan (no snickers), and the Jaguar E-Type. I threw one classy one in there.
I think we’re to the last one, and it’s not so much a who-owns-who but more of a ‘what’s out there’ kind of thing. Partially because I don’t even know and found it interesting. And it’s also really bright and pretty and I’m sort of like a raccoon that way; I like shiny, pretty things. Maybe a bunch of us really should work on trying to get “shiny” into the working vocabulary. People would think we were crazy at first, but they’d eventually start saying it because they’d feel awkward not saying it, even if they had no idea it was from Firefly and just means cool, basically. Heh heh.
Prism Social Media Infographic; 2010
Oh, for goodness sake, I have the German one. It’s in English, but let me go see if I can find one for the States. I’ll leave this one here. It could be interesting for comparison. This is really sort of fascinating. I found two more, one for an online free class, and one for a class in Spanish for Latin America. Each time the chart changes a little and becomes more broken up by purpose of the media. These are still older charts, but they’re fascinating.
This is the one for the class in the US:
Art of Listening, 2nd Ed.
2010
http://www.pamorama.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/artoflistening.jpg
The web site the class is on can be found at: http://www.slideshare.net/zaid/social-media-web-20-for-learning-2nd-edition
If it’s not that one, then I mixed the two up (heh heh) when I was trying to find space to save all of the information. The other slides in the lecture looked truly fascinating. They have other classes as well. The third one I found was for another class, this time somewhere in Latin America. Okay, I felt bad just saying, “Latin America” so I went back and checked. This is their web address: http://www.clasesdeperiodismo.com/Basically, they are an online school for Latin American students. This is their school description: Escuela virtual de periodismo digital para América Latina. It’s for students who speak Spanish! I’ll put it through my translator–I used to speak Spanish–the only word I don’t know is periodismo. Oh! Okay. As well as I can translate it, it’s a virtual school for online (?) journalists in Latin America. Or something resembling that. I realized I didn’t know the exact meaning of ‘digital’ either–sometimes they’re not direct even if they look like they are. My pocket dictionary of Spanish didn’t consider it important enough (or the dictionary’s too old) to put it in. But “dirigible” was. And it’s the same in Spanish. “Dirigible.” This infographic is from 2013, and it looks like Brian Solis and Jess3 have put much effort into it since 2010. It really looks nice and much cleaner. I think having the colors a little more muted helps, even though I still like the bright colors of the others, it does detract a little. It’s interesting to see the evolution of an infographic.
Captura de pantalla
2013-07-01
That was a long and twisty path that I didn’t think would take this long. 🙂 And if you’ve reached this point, thank you for sticking with me. So I think you deserve something funny (well, I think it’s funny because I do this often):
livinginmultipleworlds 
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