Largest publisher

The largest publishing firm is RELX (formerly Reed-Elsevier), a multinational information services company based in London, UK. According to the 2020 edition of the Global 50 Ranking of the Publishing Industry, an annual report compiled by Livres Hebdo and Ruediger Wischenbart Content and Consulting, the publishing divisions of the RELX group posted revenues of $5.636 billion for the 2019 financial year.

The publishing industry is dominated by three main sectors. They are trade publishing, which sells general-interest fiction and non-fiction to consumers through the retail book trade; Scientific, Technical and Medical publishing (known by the acronym STM), which sells specialist books, journals and information services to industry and academia; and education, which sells textbooks course materials and assessment services to schools and higher education institutions.

Traditionally, the trade publishing world was the largest and more prosperous sector, but in the last few decades the balance has shifted. Most STM publishers have embraced digital distribution methods, adopting "information as a service" models instead of discrete print publications. This means their business activities look less like what people would traditionally associate with the term "publishing", but it has boosted their revenues to the point where they now far eclipse the trade publishing sector. STM publishers account for 55% of the revenue earned by the companies in the Global 50's top 10, while trade publishers account for just 24%.

RELX is the result of numerous mergers; the most important brands within its publishing portfolio are the Elsevier STM publishing empire and LexisNexis – an information and news service used by the legal and financial sectors worldwide. Its headquarters is divided between London, UK, and Amsterdam, Netherlands. According to its most recent annual report, only 9 percent of its publishing revenue came from publishing printed books, with the rest coming from electronic media and information services.