I spent part of the Bank Holiday weekend catching up on back issues of the trade press and came across this article Publishing's World Leaders in the constantly improving and Internet-friendly Publishers Weekly and co-sponsored by Livres Hebdo whose copyright this is. I have permission from them and the producer Ruediger Wischenbart and I would have put a (c) with a circle round it next to Livres Hebdo 2007 but I can't work out how to find that symbol.

I post the chart here as a reminder of the range, internationalism and relative size of the world's major publishers and to give perspective to some of the discussions on this blog.

As a follow-up to the Death of the Publisher? (I wish I'd headed it Death of a Publisher? - so much more literary) there is an excellent essay on the Exact Editions blog. Adam Hodgkin points out that these print-on-demand operations are likely to have a major democratising impact for authors which will result in millions more titles being published. I agree but the inevitable consequence of that will be the even greater need for publishers to continue to act as quality arbiters. My fear specifically about the Amazon initiative is that the huge additional numbers of unrefereed titles available for sale and promised exposure on Amazon by Amazon will obscure other potentially more relevant titles thus diminishing the customer experience. The bad will drive out the good.