HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the world's largest publishing companies and is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House , Simon & Schuster , Hachette , and Macmillan . The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Corp . The name is a combination of several publishing firm names: Harper & Row , an American publishing company acquired in 1987—whose own name was the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers (founded in 1817) and Row, Peterson & Company—together with UK publishing company William Collins, Sons (founded in 1819), acquired in 1989.