The Global Review with a Local Perspective

What we all know is that ebooks took off first in the US and are now catching fire in the UK. The key components of that growth were powerful retailers pushing good ereading devices, a large corpus of digitized content in the reflowable epub format, a high level of connectivity and ecommerce-habituated consumers, and, particularly in the US, a large number of people interested in the same content set operating with one currency and one set of commercial rules. These conditions don’t exist to the same extent in most places in the world.

This panel of  publishing executives from Europe, Asia, and Latin America will deliver perspectives on the state of digital change from around the world. The panelists will discuss the barriers to ebook uptake everywhere else and what publishers, particularly, can do to make the transition profitable. We will get a variety of local perspectives about the VAT barrier (VAT is higher for ebooks than for print books just about everywhere in the world), the growth of device penetration, the digitization of local language content, and the impact of so much English-language content being available in each part of the world. The objective of this discussion is to give our attendees from all over the world a more clearly-articulated view of where ebook breakthroughs are likely to happen next and where else we might be looking at a long wait.

Moderators

Michael Cader
Publishers Lunch and PublishersMarketplace.com

Michael Cader is the creator of Publishers Lunch, the largest-circulation book publishing industry publication in the world, and its companion website PublishersMarketplace.com, which offers comprehensive news, databases, tools and more for book publishing professionals. For 15 years he created and produced over 300 books through his book packaging company, Cader Books.


Mike Shatzkin
Founder & CEO, The Idea Logical Company

Mike Shatzkin is the Founder & CEO of The Idea Logical Company and a widely-acknowledged thought leader about digital change in the book publishing industry. In his nearly 50 years in publishing, he has played almost all the roles: bookseller, author, agent, production director, sales and marketing director, and, for the past 30 years, consultant. His insights about how the industry functions and how it accommodates digital change form the basis of all of the company’s consulting efforts.

Panelists

Riccardo Cavallero
General Manager, Trade Books Division, Mondadori Group

Riccardo Cavallero has been the General Manager of the Mondadori Group’s Trade Books Division since January 2010.  He joined Mondadori in 1995 as Marketing Director for books and two years later was appointed General Manager of the Group’s Grijalbo publishing house and, in 2000, Director of Mondadori Books. The following year the Random House Mondadori joint-venture was established for which Cavallero was appointed Managing Director, initially based in New York and then, from 2004, in Barcelona.

Michael Justus
Managing Director and CFO, S. Fischer Verlag

After having studied Economics, Michael Justus (born 1962) worked as an editor and, later on, for more than 10 years as Managing Director of Business & Economics, Publisher Schäffer-Poeschel in Stuttgart. Additionally, he became MD of Humanities Publisher J.B. Metzler in 2002. Since 2008 he is MD and CFO of Trade Publisher S. Fischer in Frankfurt.

Kris Kliemann
VP, Director of Global RightsJohn Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Kris Kliemann, Vice President and Director of Global Rights at John Wiley and SonsInc, oversees Wiley’s Rights, Licensing and Permissions departments. Her team consistsof more than 40 people, located in the U.S., England, Germany, Singapore, and Beijing,and is responsible for rights marketing, negotiation, deals and contracts across Wiley’sdiverse portfolio of businesses worldwide. Prior to Wiley, Kris held positions at Random House, Hyperion/Disney, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Henry Holt and HBJ. Hermany years of experience includes a wide variety of deals over a wide range of fictionand non-fiction from the highly literary to commercial to scholarly.

Joe Li
Leader of International Business, Founder Apabi Technology, Ltd.

Joe Li is the Leader of International Business at Founder Apabi Technology, Ltd. An executive with 8 years of experience in digital publishing, his market reach extends to America, Europe, Australia, Singapore, Taiwan and Hongkong. He lives in Beijing.


Sergio Machado
President and CEO, Record Publishing Group, Brazil

Economist, from a family of booksellers and publishers, joined the family company in 1974. Became President in 1989 with the retirement of founder Alfredo Machado. Since then, has acquired several other publishing houses in Brazil which now are part of the Record Publsihing Group, that consists of Editora Record, Bertrand Brasil, Editora BestSeller, Editora José Olympio, Editora Civilização Brasileira and Verus Editora. President of the Brazilian Publishers Association from 1994-1999. Awarded Chevalier de L’ordre des Arts et de Lettres by the French Cultural Ministry in 1998.