Penguin Random House in the context of "Publishing company"

Random House is an imprint and publishing group of Penguin Random House. Founded in 1927 by businessmen Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer as an imprint of Modern Library, it quickly overtook Modern Library as the parent imprint. Over the following decades, a series of acquisitions made it into one of the largest publishers in the United States. In 2013, it was merged with Penguin Group to form Penguin Random House, which is owned by the Germany-based media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Penguin Random House uses its brand for Random House Publishing Group and Random House Children's Books, as well as several imprints.

Publishing is the process of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, comic books, newspapers, and magazines to the public. With the advent of digital information systems, the scope has expanded to include digital publishing such as e-books, digital magazines, websites, social media, music, and video game publishing.

The commercial publishing industry ranges from large multinational conglomerates such as News Corp, Pearson, Penguin Random House, and Thomson Reuters to major retail brands and thousands of small independent publishers. It has various divisions such as trade/retail publishing of fiction and non-fiction, educational publishing, and academic and scientific publishing. Publishing is also undertaken by governments, civil society, and private companies for administrative or compliance requirements, business, research, advocacy, or public interest objectives. This can include annual reports, research reports, market research, policy briefings, and technical reports. Self-publishing has become very common.

Doubleday is an American publishing company. It was founded as the Doubleday & McClure Company in 1897. By 1947, it was the largest book publisher in the United States. It published the work of mostly U.S. authors under a number of imprints and distributed them through its own stores.

In 2009, Doubleday merged with Knopf Publishing Group to form the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, which, as of 2018, is part of Penguin Random House.

The Boxcar Children is a children's book series originally created and written by American first-grade school teacher Gertrude Chandler Warner and currently published by Penguin Random House. It was previously published through Albert, Whitman and Company until 2023. Today, the series includes over 160 titles, with more being released every year. The series is aimed at readers in grades 2–6.

Originally published in 1924 by Rand McNally (as The Box-Car Children) and reissued in a shorter revised form in 1942 by Albert Whitman & Company, The Boxcar Children tells the story of four orphaned children: Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny Alden. They create a home for themselves in an abandoned boxcar in the forest. They eventually meet their paternal grandfather, who is a wealthy and kind man (although the children had believed him to be cruel since he did not like their mother). The children decide to live with him, who moves the beloved boxcar to his backyard so the children can use it as a playhouse. The book was adapted as a film of the same name in 2014 and the sequel novel Surprise Island was released as a film in 2018. Based on a 2007 online poll, the National Education Association listed the original book as one of its "Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children". In 2012, the original novel was ranked among the all-time "Top 100 Chapter Books", or children's novels, in a survey published by School Library Journal.

Macmillan Publishers (Pan Macmillan in the UK and Macmillan Publishers in the US) is a British publishing company traditionally considered to be one of the "Big Five" English language publishers (along with Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster).

Founded in London in 1843 by Scottish brothers Daniel and Alexander Macmillan, the firm soon established itself as a leading publisher in Britain. It published two of the best-known works of Victorian-era children's literature, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894).

The direct market is the dominant distribution and retail network for American comic books. The concept of the direct market was created in the 1970s by Phil Seuling. The network currently consists of:

• three major comic distributors:
  • Diamond Comic Distributors, which distributes most, if not all, non-DC/Marvel/Image/IDW/Dark Horse comics (having exclusive deals with those publishers) and wholesales Marvel Comics, Image Comics, IDW Publishing, and Dark Horse Comics.
  • Lunar Distribution (which distributes DC Comics since 2020 and Image Comics since 2023);
  • Penguin Random House Publisher Services (the distribution arm of the publishing company), which since 1 October 2021 distributes Marvel Comics, since 1 June 2022 distributes IDW Publishing, and since 1 June 2023 distributes Dark Horse Comics; and
• the majority of comics specialty stores, and
• other retailers of comic books and related merchandise.

The name is no longer a fully accurate description of the model by which it operates, but derives from its original implementation: retailers bypassing existing distributors to make "direct" purchases from publishers. The defining characteristic of the direct market however is non-returnability: unlike book store and news stand distribution, which operate on a sale-or-return model, direct market distribution prohibits distributors and retailers from returning their unsold merchandise for refunds. In exchange for more favorable ordering terms, retailers and distributors must gamble that they can accurately predict their customers' demand for products. Each month's surplus inventory, meanwhile, could be archived and sold later, driving the development of an organized market for "back issues."