Publishing is a business of names on spines, but it is run by names most readers never see. The men and women who lead the world's great houses decide — through the imprints they fund, the formats they back and the backlists they protect — what the next decade of reading will look like.

Start in New York, where the largest of them all is led by Nihar Malaviya, chief executive of Penguin Random House. Malaviya, who came to the top job from the company's presidency and chief operating role in the United States, runs more than 350 imprints across six continents for Germany's Bertelsmann. His house published about 14,500 new works in 2025 and sold more than 750 million books in all formats. The strategy visible from outside is a deliberate one: fiercely independent imprints — Knopf, Viking, Riverhead, Crown — sharing one supply chain, one data operation and one audio studio system. The list is decentralised; the machinery is not.

Across the Atlantic system sits David Shelley, who since 2024 has held a job no one held before him: chief executive of both Hachette Book Group in the United States and Hachette UK, the English-language halves of France's Hachette Livre. Shelley began as an editor and rose through Little, Brown and Orion; his appointment was a statement by parent Lagardère that English-language publishing is now one market with two capitals. His signature campaign, Raising Readers, printed in the back of millions of Hachette books, is aimed at the industry's most consequential number — the share of children who read for pleasure.

The longest-serving chief in the Big Five is Brian Murray of HarperCollins, president and chief executive since 2008 under News Corp. Murray's tenure has been defined by globalisation and by audio and digital growth: HarperCollins now publishes in markets from Brazil to India to China, and its foreign-language programme alone has added $100 million in revenue since its inception, by the company's own reporting. At Macmillan, Jon Yaged — who rose through children's publishing — leads the Holtzbrinck-owned house whose list runs from Farrar, Straus and Giroux to Tor, the world's largest science-fiction and fantasy imprint. A children's publisher at the head of a general house is a pattern, not an accident: children's and young-adult lists are where reading habits, and readers, are made.

The newest name in the Big Five arrived in March 2026. Greg Greeley, who spent nearly two decades at Amazon — helping to build its books, self-publishing and audiobook businesses — succeeded Jonathan Karp as chief executive of Simon & Schuster, owned since 2023 by KKR. Karp, characteristically, did not leave the building: he stayed to found Simon Six, an imprint publishing six books a year. Prediction: the Greeley appointment will be read in time as the moment a major house put reader discovery — the science of how a book finds its audience — formally in charge of the list itself.

Europe's great houses are run, in several cases, by the families that founded them or by lifers who amount to the same thing. In Stockholm, Håkan Rudels leads Bonnier Books, the book arm of the family-controlled Bonnier Group, whose publishing reaches back to 1837 and whose BookBeat service streams audiobooks to more than 1.2 million paying users — a reminder that in Scandinavia, audio is not a format but the market's centre of gravity. In Milan, Antonio Porro runs the Mondadori Group for chairman Marina Berlusconi; in Madrid, José Creuheras presides over Grupo Planeta, family-owned, with 70 imprints and a 2025 turnover of €2.2 billion across publishing, education and media. In Paris, Antoine Gallimard has led Éditions Gallimard and the Madrigall group since 1988 — the Pléiade on one side, Harry Potter in French on the other — and in 2023 brought his daughters Charlotte and Laure into the group's management as the family's fourth publishing generation took its places.

In Tokyo, publishing power wears a different shape. Yoshinobu Noma, president and chief executive of Kodansha since 2011, is the fourth generation of his family to run the house his great-grandfather founded in 1909; its manga — Attack on Titan above all — are read on every continent. At Kadokawa, president and chief executive Takeshi Natsuno pursues a strategy the company calls Global Media Mix with Technology: a light novel is not finished when it is printed, but begun — anime, games and film are the same property in successive forms. The Hitotsubashi Group houses, Shueisha and Shogakukan, publish Weekly Shonen Jump and the Doraemon books respectively, and jointly own Viz Media in the United States. France, where one book in seven sold is manga, and the United States, where manga shelves anchor bookstores, are both downstream of decisions taken in three Tokyo postcodes.

The education and scholarly houses answer to a different clock. Peter Warwick leads Scholastic, whose Book Fairs and Graphix imprint make it the largest children's publisher in the world. Omar Abbosh at Pearson and Matthew Kissner at Wiley both speak the language of artificial intelligence and licensing as fluently as the language of lists — Wiley's research content is now licensed to train AI models as a stated line of business. At McGraw Hill, Philip Moyer, a former Google Cloud AI executive, became president and chief executive in February 2026. Prediction: within five years, the education houses will describe themselves — accurately — as assessment and learning companies that also publish, and the word publisher will belong again to the trade houses.

And then there are the independents, where the person at the top is often the point of the enterprise. Julia Reidhead, chairman and president of W. W. Norton, leads the largest employee-owned publisher in the United States; the staff who make the books own the house, a structure in place since the 1950s. Morgan Entrekin has run Grove Atlantic since he merged its two parent houses in 1993. Dominique Raccah founded Sourcebooks from her home in Naperville, Illinois, in 1987 and still leads it, with Penguin Random House as a 45 percent minority investor content to let Sourcebooks be Sourcebooks. In Edinburgh, Jamie Byng of Canongate moved his authors to quarterly royalty payments in 2026 — a small administrative change that said everything about where an independent's loyalties sit. In London, Mary Cannam leads Faber, the house of Eliot and Ishiguro, while at Bloomsbury founder Nigel Newton — who in 2026 began a five-year move to executive chairman, four decades after founding the company — has set the industry's most closely watched succession in motion.

What do their lists, taken together, say about where reading is going? Four things. First, the backlist is the business: the houses above earn their steadiest money from books published years or decades ago, and their chief executives talk about longevity the way earlier generations talked about the frontlist. Second, audio is a first format, not an afterthought — in Stockholm and New York alike it is planned at acquisition, not adapted afterwards. Third, children's books, graphic novels and manga are the growth engine of general publishing on three continents, and the executives who understand young readers keep being promoted over those who do not. Fourth, scale and independence have stopped being opposites: the largest house on earth protects its imprints' autonomy as a matter of strategy, and the most successful independents borrow the large houses' machinery without selling them the house.

Prediction: the next reshaping of this map will come not from a merger of giants — regulators have already shown their view of that — but from the two ends of the telescope at once: global groups buying discovery, audio and graphic-novel capability, and founder-led independents using the same technologies to stay independent longer. The names in this article will change; several already have this year. The structure they reveal — a handful of global groups, a tier of national champions, and a durable company of independents — looks built to last.

Leadership details verified against official company sources in October 2026 for LIKE® Magazine's guide, The World's Publishing Houses. Company figures are as published by the houses and their parents for the years stated.