Where do the books in a library come from? How are they chosen? The short answer is that they come from various business markets. In America’s public libraries, most of our holdings come from just a handful of publishers, the so-called “Big Five.” They are Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan. On the one hand, the Big Five produce only about 10-20% of all new titles in a year published through conventional publishers. Add in self-published books, and the share of Big Five in global publishing shrinks to around 2.5%. But the Big Five still control over 80% of the trade book market in the US — and probably higher than that in public libraries. How do librarians decide which books to buy? There are three main sources: Publishers catalogs and purchase lists. Librarians usually buy things through jobbers–distributors who knows how to work with us. Those distributors are biased toward the bigger companies. Big publishers have the most ...