The company was the publisher of 19th century American literary figures like James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as of legal, religious, and other non-fiction titles.

Wiley later shifted its focus to scientific, technical, and engineering subject areas, abandoning its literary interests.

The company acquired its present name in 1876, when John's second son William H. Wiley joined his brother Charles in the business.

[22] On April 16, 2012, the company announced the establishment of Wiley Brasil Editora LTDA in São Paulo, Brazil, effective May 1, 2012.

[23] Wiley's scientific, technical, and medical business was expanded by the acquisition of Blackwell Publishing in February 2007 for US$1.12 billion, its largest purchase to that time.

The combined business, named Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly (also known as Wiley-Blackwell), publishes, in print and online, 1,600 scholarly peer-reviewed journals and an extensive collection of books, reference works, databases, and laboratory manuals in the life and physical sciences, medicine and allied health, engineering, the humanities, and the social sciences.

[26] Through a backfile initiative completed in 2007, 8.2 million pages of journal content have been made available online, a collection dating back to 1799.

Other journals published include Angewandte Chemie, Advanced Materials, Hepatology, International Finance and Liver Transplantation.

[29] On February 17, 2012, Wiley announced the acquisition of Inscape Holdings Inc., which provides DISC assessments and training for interpersonal business skills.

[18] Wiley stated it would keep the Hindawi journals under their previous brand and continue developing the open source publishing platform Phenom.

[40] In 2021, Wiley announced the acquisition of eJournalPress (EJP), a provider of web-based technology solutions for scholarly publishing companies.

[42] Wiley partners with GreyCampus to provide professional learning solutions[buzzword] around big data and digital literacy.

[43] Wiley has also partnered with five other higher-education publishers to create CourseSmart, a company developed to sell college textbooks in eTextbook format on a common platform.

[44] In 2002, Wiley created a partnership with French publisher Anuman Interactive in order to launch a series of e-books adapted from the For Dummies collection.

[45] In 2013, Wiley partnered with American Graphics Institute to create an online education video and e-book subscription service called The Digital Classroom.

The program will be built on the existing Wiley efficient learning platform and Christian's legacy Financial Risk Manager[47] product.

[citation needed] Higher Education's "WileyPLUS" is an online product that combines electronic versions of texts with media resources and tools for instructors and students.

[52] In September 2019, Wiley entered into a collaboration with IIM Lucknow to offer analytics courses for finance executives.

[63] In October 2008, Wiley launched a new online service providing continuing education units (CEU) and professional development hour (PDH) credits to architects and designers.

Seventh-generation members Jesse and Nate Wiley work in the company's Professional/Trade and Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly businesses, respectively.

Wiley's operations are organized into three business divisions: The company has approximately 10,000 employees worldwide, with headquarters in Hoboken, New Jersey, since 2002.

In 1998, Financial Times selected Wiley as one of the "most respected companies" with a "strong and well thought out strategy" in its global survey of CEOs.

[75] In 2020, the entire editorial board of the European Law Journal  [d] resigned over a dispute about contract terms and the behavior of its publisher, Wiley.

[81] Over a two-year period, researchers found that at least 419 articles "appeared to match manuscripts that later appeared in dozens of different journals" and that "more than 100 of these identified papers were published in 68 journals run by established publishers, including Elsevier, Oxford University Press, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wolters Kluwer, and Wiley-Blackwell.

[89][90] In 2008, John Wiley & Sons filed suit against Thailand native Supap Kirtsaeng over the sale of textbooks made outside of the United States and then imported into the country.

[91] In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court held 6–3 that the first-sale doctrine applied to copies of copyrighted works made and sold abroad at lower prices, reversing the Second Circuit decision which had favored Wiley.

[93][94] In September 2024, Lucina Uddin, a neuroscience professor at UCLA, sued John Wiley & Sons along with five other academic journal publishers in a proposed class-action lawsuit, alleging that the publishers violated antitrust law by agreeing not to compete against each other for manuscripts and by denying scholars payment for peer review services.