The leading publisher that won't sell (almost) any books this Sant Jordi

In medical schools around the world, there is a book that is frequently cited. It is the manualFarreras Rozman: Internal medicine. It has been published continuously since 1929, is regularly updated, and has already accumulated 20 editions. It is the largest publisher in the world. In 2023 alone, it had a turnover of €5.654 billion, according to the ranking of the 50 largest publishers in the world, published by the consulting firm Ruediger Wischenbart. Its turnover was €959 million. Who is behind this group, and how has it managed to become the global king of the sector?

Elsevier's power lies in its specialization. It is a publishing house dedicated exclusively to publishing scientific, technical, and medical content: its book catalog includes everything from a manual on hyperautomation in precision agriculture for €389 to a book on magnetic resonance pulse sequences for €457. It is also responsible for publishing two of the most prestigious scientific journals:The LancetandCellBehind Elsevier there is a story in which, if you want to find the bone, you have to travel back five centuries.

From books to data

In 1580, in the Dutch city of Leiden, the printer and bookseller Lodewijk Elzevier opened his own workshop and began publishing scientific works by authors such as Galileo. His sons and subsequent generations continued his business until 1791, when it closed. However, almost a century later, another publishing project with similar ambitions took off. It was in 1880 in Rotterdam, led by Jacobus George Robbers. This bookseller, despite having no ties to the previous business, adopted the name and logo of the historic Elsevier and, for almost two decades, published literary classics and the encyclopedia. Winkler Prins, very popular in the Netherlands. It only had 10 employees. However, in 1945 they made a breakthrough that took them to the next level: creating the weekly current affairs magazine Elsevier's Weekly Bulletin. It is still published today and has a circulation of over 65,000 copies.

The revenue from this movement served to boost the publisher's scientific publications. By the 1950s, the company already had a headquarters in London and a second international office in New York. In the 1970s, the company expanded with the acquisition of competitors such as North-Holland and Excerpta Medica and merged with the Dutch newspaper publisher NDU. It also began efforts to digitize, which increased in the 1990s with the creation of Science Direct, the first online repository of electronic scientific books and articles. In 2004, it launched Scopus, a multidisciplinary database of metadata for academic publications, and in 2013, it acquired Mendeley, an English company dedicated to the management and dissemination of research articles that had 2.3 million users.

At the same time, in 1993 Elsevier merged with Reed International, the leading English publishing house at the time. This gave rise to the Reed Elsevier company, which in 2015 was renamed the RELX group. This was a key move in expanding into the English-speaking market. Today, the company continues to maintain scientific publishing at the heart of its business: in addition to books and scientific journals, it controls the main technological platforms and databases of academic articles. However, its portfolio also includes companies in the financial sector, such as LexisNexis and Accuity, specialized in detecting money laundering, and data analysis platforms, such as Cirium, widely used in the aeronautical world. It also owns the world's largest exhibition company, RX, which attracts 7 million visitors each year to the 500 events it organizes.