Why does HarperCollins need a VP of Innovation? Ana Maria Allessi, who holds that very title, tells us about a future in which books look a lot like apps. Ana Maria Allessi is somewhat of an oddity, for someone who’s worked at a publishing house for almost 13 years. While publishing is rife with employees who lament the death of print, having only accepted the digital revolution grudgingly, Allessi has no reason to be similarly sentimental. She joined HarperCollins to work in audio books, and in 2004 began to add ebooks to her specialty. “I didn’t have to give up the print book process because I never lived it,” she says. Allessi is HarperCollins’s VP of Innovation, a title that seems more at home at a technology company than a publisher. But increasingly, say Allessi and her colleagues, publishers need to be thinking like technology companies, or at least like broader media companies. A book is no longer just a book, of course. It’s consumed on e-readers, on tablets, on smartphones, or as mp3 files. And it’s one of Allessi’s tasks to marshal the innovation of the tech world to transform yet further the ways books are consumed.Read Full Story Continue reading at 'Fast Company'
[ Fast Company | 2013-06-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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