People were interested enough in Lagardere Publishing’s chart of their performance since 2006 – and what it might or might not say about the effect of ebooks on publishers’ financial results — that we dug in to produce similar charts for the other largest publicly reporting publishers. (Which means everyone but Macmillan.) Complications abound, of course. Everyone reports slightly different measures of profit margin, and special transactions over the years can significantly skew the results. Our first chart is a composite that aggregates the annual results of all 5 reporting companies (Hachette; Harper; Simon & Schuster; Penguin; and Random House). Results originally […]
