Speakers on Books

As President of the Baensch International Group Ltd., Robert Baensch specializes in international publishing, start-up and turnaround management. He served eleven years as the Associate Professor of Publishing and former director of the New York University’s Center for Publishing. He was the Senior VP for marketing for Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., and, prior to that, was the Director for publishing at the American Institute of Physics where he was responsible for over 60 journals, a book program, print publishing, and database online information services. Previously, Baensch was the Vice President-Marketing of Macmillan Publishing Company and also directed the Macmillan Software Company and English as a Second Language Multimedia Program. He is currently on the board of the Consumers Union and serves as editor of the book,The Publishing Industry in China, and of the journal Publishing Research Quarterly. Baensch received a B.A. degree from the Johns Hopkins University and an S.E.P. from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Over an academic career spanning more than two decades, Baron’s wide-ranging research interests have included human resources; organizational design and behavior; social stratification and inequality; work, labor markets, and careers; economic sociology; and entrepreneurial companies. Prior to coming to Yale, he taught the MBA core course, “Human Resource Management” at Stanford University. He was co-director of the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies (SPEC), a large-scale longitudinal study of the organizational design, human resource management practices, and financial and non-financial performance measures of entrepreneurial firms in Silicon Valley.

Nicholas Callaway feels he was destined to become an app developer all his life. In August 2010, with an investment from Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers, Nicholas Callaway founded Callaway Digital Arts with the idea to transform the media landscape with interactive apps for the iPad generation. As the lines between traditional media converge, CDA is redefining the story, play, and “how to" content experience with products that constitute a new medium. Callaway Digital Arts creates beautiful, engaging apps that leave a lasting impression on users of all ages. Employing a strategic combination of market-leading creativity, innovative design, and cutting-edge technology, the company is committed to producing quality, immersive, interactive touch screen experiences in both the Lifestyle (Martha Stewart Makes Cookies) and Children’s (Miss Spider Series, Thomas & Friends, and Sesame Street) categories.  Prior to the launch of Callaway Digital Arts, Nicholas spent 30 years as a print-based publisher, animation producer (the Miss Spider 3D CGI television series), and creator of lifestyle consumer products brands (i.e., Sunny Patch) as the founder/chairman of Callaway Arts & Entertainment.  He has produced some of the most successful and highest-profile illustrated books of our time, working with such renowned artists as Georgia O’Keeffe, Irving Penn, David Kirk, Madonna, and many more.  He received his B.A. from Harvard in Classics and Fine Arts.  He has been practicing Anusara Yoga for 10 years, soon to be a series of Callaway Digital Arts apps for iPad.

Neil De Young is responsible for managing the eBook program for the Hachette Book Group, overseeing the account management of the digital supply chain, developing enriched content, reviewing new business opportunities, and coordinating digital strategy. He is a member of the IDPF (International Digital Publisher’s Forum) and AAP (Association of American Publishers) Digital Issues Working Group. As an Adjunct Professor at Hofstra University, he teaches the Digital Publishing course in the Publishing Studies program. He has past experience in application management, including system design, upgrades, and user-support management, as well as experience in sales and internet marketing at Scholastic and Hyperion. De Young holds a B.A. from Hofstra University and an M.S. from New York University.

Sue Fleming develops and maintains the editorial direction of all content on Simon & Schuster’s consumer facing site, simonandschuster.com; curates and manages book content for all proprietary verticals; creates and syndicates book content for distribution to other media partners and manages creation, production and syndication of all video content to Simon & Schuster sites, marketing partners and for Simon & Schuster enhanced e-Books. Prior to her role in the digital group,  Fleming was Vice President, Director of Online and Consumer Marketing at Simon & Schuster and Vice President, Director of Publicity at Touchstone Books.  She has been an Adjunct Professor at the NYU School of Continuing and Professional Studies and Hofstra University.  In 2009 she was named one of the 50 Top Women In Publishing by Book Business Magazine.

Susan Gibbons held library positions at Indiana University and University of Massachusetts, Amherst before moving to the University of Rochester in 2000, where she worked as the director of digital library initiatives before moving into administration. Gibbons was appointed in 2008 as the Vice Provost and the Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester. Gibbons is well known in the library world, most significantly for the library user studies at Rochester she has undertaken since 2004. In collaboration with an anthropologist, she determined how faculty and students do their academic work, find information, and make use of the physical and technological resources offered by the libraries. The results have led to service, collections and physical space changes in the River Campus Libraries designed to better meet user needs. Gibbons earned an M.L.S. and M.A. in history from Indiana University, professional M.B.A. from the University of Massachusetts and a doctorate in higher education administration from the University of Rochester.

David R. Godine attended Dartmouth College, where he received his first introduction to typography and the history of the book. After a stint in the Army and a degree from Harvard's School of Education, he spent two years working for the printer and artist Leonard Baskin before starting his own printing operation in an abandoned cow barn in Brookline. After five years, he gave up printing to devote his energies to full-time publishing and has continued to produce books of both intellectual and physical quality for forty years. His company issues between 30 and 40 new titles a year in a variety of fields. Its special interests include children’s books, the history of typography and graphic design, foreign literature in translation, art and architecture, poetry, and word usage. Between the Godine lists and the titles he absorbed from John Martin's Black Sparrow Press, he has around 500 titles in print and reprints around 50 every year. 

Bruce Harris began his independent consultancy practice in 2004 after a forty-year career in publishing, most recently as Publisher-COO of Workman Publishing. At Workman, he was associated with publishing over 15 New York Times bestsellers, including 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. Prior to joining Workman, he was Executive Vice President of Random House, Inc. and President of its trade sales and marketing division. From 1980-1988, he served as Vice President and Director of Publishing for Crown Publishers. He is also the Founding Publisher of Harmony Books, where he published Douglas Adams, Maurice Sendak, Martin Amis, and Chuck Berry. As a consultant he has worked for both authors and publishers, including Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, author of the six volume work Modernist Cuisine He has also consulted for many companies including A.A. Knopf, MyFamily.com, Hyperion Books, The Taunton Press, and Time-Warner. He received a B.A. from New York University. 

Born in England, Nigel Holmes studied illustration at the Royal College of Art in London and then freelanced for magazines and newspapers for 12 years before coming to America in 1978 to work for Time Magazine. He became graphics director at Time, where his pictorial explanations of complex subjects helped readers understand otherwise abstract numbers and difficult scientific concepts. In 1994, he founded his own business, Explanation Graphics, and has worked with a variety of clients including American Express, The Smithsonian Institution, and United Healthcare. He also does graphics and illustrations for publications such as The Atlantic, Harper’s, National Geographic and The New York Times. Holmes has written six books on aspects of information design, including most recently, Wordless Diagrams, and Nigel Holmes on Information Design. 

Michael Jacobs started in publishing as a page in the main branch of the Oakland (CA) Public Library and went on to work at Bookpeople, an employee-owned distributor of small and independent press books. His professional track took him to Penguin USA, where he started as a sales representative based in the Pacific Northwest and later became President of the Viking Penguin division and a member of the board of directors. He then served as Executive Vice President of Simon and Schuster’s Trade division, Publisher of the Free Press, and Senior Vice President in Scholastic’s trade book group. While at Scholastic, he orchestrated the publishing, marketing, sales, and distribution of the most successful books in publishing history – the first five Harry Potter volumes. Jacobs joined Abrams in 2004, where he oversaw the publication of the best-selling Wimpy Kid series. He is on the board of directors of the Academy of American Poets and is an Eli Whitney scholar at Yale University.

Bruce Judson is a digital business innovator and best-selling author. Prior to joining the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, he served as a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Yale School of Management. He is the author of several books related to Internet business, including the best-selling NetMarketing and Go It Alone!, which was published in 2003 and predicted the central role software-as-a-service and cloud computing would play in the future of business. As the General Manager of Time Inc. New Media, Judson was one of the co-founders of Time Warner's initial Internet initiatives. He was named by Advertising Age as one of the nation's leading interactive marketers in the magazine's first-ever list. In 2004, he partnered with his publisher, HarperCollins, in a widely publicized experiment that made Go It Alone! available for free on the Web with advertiser support (see www.BruceJudson.com) at the same time the paperback version was released. Judson is also the founder of several successful Internet ventures, based on the principles described in Go It Alone! He was profiled in the March 2010 issue of Entrepreneur magazine. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and holds advanced degrees from the Yale Law School and the Yale School of Management.

Liisa McCloy-Kelley is responsible for all Random House eBook development, production, and distribution and for managing Random House's strategic plan for content preparation. She has been at Random House for nearly twenty years. Since 2000, she has worked on a variety of eBook standards including the IDPF work on OEB, EPUB, ONIX and ISBN. She has spoken at a variety of conferences and has taught at Wellesley and at the New York University Publishing Center.

Kirsty Melville is President and Publisher of the Book Division of Andrews McMeel Publishing, a company that has helped define American popular culture by giving voice to the storytellers of our age. Along with its sister divisions, Universal Uclick and AMUSE, this quiet Kansas City company has discovered, nurtured, and distributed some of the most noteworthy creative talents of our time through a variety of comic features, books, calendars, and gift items. Under Melville’s leadership, AMP has initiated a cookbook program that has met with great success and several humor titles have gone on to become New York Times bestsellers. Responsible for digital publishing initiatives, she has pursued a digital strategy that strives to find a meeting point between the digital world and the tactile, three-dimensional experience provided by illustrated books.

Craig Mod is a writer, designer, publisher, and developer concerned with the future of publishing and storytelling. He is co-author and designer of Art Space Tokyo, an intimate guide to the Tokyo art world. He was based in Tokyo for a decade until October 2010, when he moved to the California Bay Area to work for Flipboard. He speaks frequently on the future of books, publishing, and digital content design. Mod is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania from the Digital Media Design (Fine Arts and Computer Science) program.

Nigel Newton is the founder and Chief Executive of Bloomsbury Publishing. He was born and raised in San Francisco. After working at Macmillan Publishers in London, he joined Sidgwick & Jackson Publishing. He left Sidgwick in 1986 to found Bloomsbury Publishing. Bloomsbury publishes 1000 books a year and employs 400 people. Its authors include Howard Jacobson, JK Rowling, John Irving, Margaret Atwood, David Guterson, Daniel Goleman, Ben McIntyre, Elizabeth Gilbert, Heston Blumenthal, Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, and Khaled Hosseini. Nigel serves as President of Book Aid International; Chairman of the Trustees of Charleston, the Bloomsbury Group house museum in East Sussex first lived in by Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell; member of the Man Booker Prize Advisory Committee; past Chair of World Book Day; past member of the Publishers Association Council; Chair of Rescue The Cuckmere Valley and member of the Advisory Boards of Qatar University Library and Cambridge University Library. He majored in English Literature at Cambridge University in England. 

John Sargent is CEO of Macmillan in the U.S., a division of the Stuttgart, Germany-based media company Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH. Macmillan comprises magazine publisher Scientific American; college publishers Bedford/St. Martin's, W.H. Freeman, and Worth Publishers; and trade publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Henry Holt, Macmillan Audio, Picador, St. Martin’s Press, and TOR. Previously, John was President and CEO of St. Martin’s Press. Before joining St. Martin’s, he was the CEO of Dorling Kindersley USA, and Publisher of the Children’s Book Division of Simon & Schuster. He serves on the executive board of the Association of American Publishers and is a member of the board of Graham Windham, a New York based foster care agency. Sargent received a B.A. in Economics from Stanford and an M.B.A. in Finance from Columbia.

E.C. Schroeder is the Director of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. He has worked at the Yale University Libraries since 1989, first at Sterling Memorial Library and since 1995 at the Beinecke. Before becoming director, he was Head of Technical Services at the Beinecke where he directed units responsible for acquisitions, cataloging, preservation and digital projects. He has a B.A. from the College of the Holy Cross and a M.L.S. from the University of Illinois.