Concentration of academic book publishers

Abstract

Academic book publishers play an important role in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). In this paper, we examine the extent to which academic books in Flanders, Belgium are concentrated in terms of their publishers. Using a data set of 26,896 books published by Flemish SSH scholars between 2000 and 2015, we investigate how evenly books are distributed over publishers. The results show that book publishing in Flanders is fairly concentrated and a relatively small number of publishers publish the majority of books. Concentration has increased over the course of years and is higher for peer-reviewed than for non-peer-reviewed books. Many publishers with a large share of books in the data set are local. Some disciplines are much more concentrated than others. Looking at the top publishers per discipline, it can be observed that most disciplines have a specific publisher profile.