April 4, 2024, 11:00am-12:00pm
CITI-IMMAA Seminar: John Sargent, Former CEO Macmillan Publishers and Executive Vice President of Holztbrinck Publishing Group
"The Economics and Management of Online Book Publishing"
Organized by Eli Noam, Columbia University
The digital revolution drastically transformed all facets of the media sector, often causing industries to trade the proverbial analog dollars for digital pennies. How can the book publishing industry evolve in a world of new distribution and new formats? What are its opportunities, as well as threats?
John Sargent is the former CEO of Macmillan Publishers (Farrar, Holt, Macmillan, Springer, Nature, Palgrave, St. Martin’s, etc.), one of the five largest American publishing houses , and top manager of the still larger Holzbrinck Group of Germany. He will join the webinar of the International Media Management Academic Association and the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information. He will discuss how book publishers handle the transition to selling books online. He will also address how major publishers handle the online platforms and publish their books online.
Sargent serves on the executive board of the Association of American Publishers. He was the widely recognized leader in the book publishers’ and authors’ fight against Amazon’s e-book pricing system.
Sargent, a third-generation publishing leader, received a BA in Economics from Stanford and an MBA from Columbia. He is the author of the recent book Turning Pages: The Adventures and Misadventures of a Publisher.