ABSTRACT
Books are frequently a central feature of intellectual activity and intellectual communications. This chapter focuses on non-fiction publishing rather than fiction publishing and within non-fiction on the areas of publishing variously termed scholarly, academic, tertiary, educational, and reference. The United Nations definition of transnational corporations covers publishing enterprises that vary in the degree of their transnationalism. In most less-developed countries with market or mixed economies, the transnational publishers dominate the areas of book publishing which have the greatest impact on intellectual knowledge, except where governments have reserved primary-school and sometimes secondary-school publishing for state publishers. Initially the transnational confined themselves to exporting their metropolitan titles to the developed countries, where they were read by the expatriate colonialists and used in the schools set up to educate a local middle class. The world book pattern contains a set of imbalances and a pervading metropolitan orientation.
