Will There Ever Be a Big Six?

How a single growth curve is rewriting the industry’s idea of scale.

The Big Five has always been treated like geography. Fixed. Familiar. A map that the industry has memorized for a long time. Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan Publishers. Five pillars that held the market up. Five corporate ecosystems everyone else learned to navigate around.

This year, the map star…