Ballantine agreed to publish it—Pohl joked that "he was just too inexperienced to know that it was no good"—and it was released in May, 1953, in simultaneous paperback and hardcover editions. The book edition dropped the previously published concluding chapters, reportedly added for the magazine version at the request of "Galaxy" editor H.L. Gold.  Twenty-five years after first publication, writing in "The Way The Future Was", Pohl estimated that it had sold perhaps ten million copies in twenty-five languages. Pohl's 2011 light revision of the novel includes references to some commercial phenomena in the Reagan–Bush era, including Enron and AIG. In 2012, it was included in the Library of America omnibus "", edited by Gary K. Wolfe. The omnibus was part of a two-volume set of 1950s science fiction, the first LOA project to include an extensive online companion site. In his study of the pioneers of science fiction, "New Maps of Hell" (1960), the novelist Kingsley Amis states that "The Space Merchants" "has many claims to being the best science-fiction novel so far." It is also ahead of its time in stressing the importance of limiting population growth and conserving natural resources. On its initial publication, Groff Conklin called the novel "perhaps the best science fiction satire since "Brave New World"." Boucher and McComas praised it as "bitter, satiric, exciting [and] easily one of the major works of logical extrapolation in several years... a sharp melodrama of power-conflict and revolt which manages... to explore all the implied developments of [its imagined] society." "Imagination" reviewer Mark Reinsberg described it as "a marvellously entertaining story" and "A brilliant future satire." P. Schuyler Miller compared the novel to "Brave New World", finding it "not so brilliant, but more consistently worked out and suffering principally... from its concessions to melodrama." At the 1976 MidAmeriCon convention in Kansas City, Alfred Bester referred to the novel as "one of the top two science fiction novels of all time." It was rated the 24th "all-time best novel" in a 1975 "Locus" poll, jointly with "The Martian Chronicles" and "The War of the Worlds". In 2012, the novel was included in the Library of America two-volume boxed set "American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s", edited by Gary K. Wolfe.