It is surprising that the largest publisher of English language books in the world is actually a German company. The German company is Bertelsmann and it can claim to be the largest publisher of English language books because it owns Penguin Random House. Random House was originally an American publishing company founded in 1927 but it was acquired by Bertelsmann AG in 1998. Penguin was a British company that was also acquired by the German conglomerate in 2013. It is estimated that sixty percent of English-language books are published through the "Big Five" corporate publishing houses: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan.
