So I stumbled onto the Forbes billionaires list, and there's Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, inching his way up to #147 on the list with $4.3 billion. Well, I thought, that's certainly hefty, but who's the richest person in publishing? Does Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud count because some of his $20 billion is invested in News Corp., and thus HarperCollins? What about Carl Icahn ($8.7 billion) and his connections to Time Warner? (Sure, they just gave up the Book Group, but they still have DC Comics...) There's always Viacom's Sumner Redstone ($7.7 billion), I suppose... and I thought about Silvio Berlusconi ($11 billion), except I couldn't remember if his media holdings included publishing firms or not.

I was almost ready to go with Dieter and Stefan von Holtzbrinck, with their cool billion apiece...until I saw Kenneth Thomson and his $19.6 billion fortune, which puts him on the top ten list. And I bet that ain't Canadian dollars, either!