Open Book with David Steinberger

Gayle Feldman is a journalist who has covered the book publishing industry for decades for Publishers Weekly and The Bookseller, among many other publications. Her new book is Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, published by Random House with legendary editor Bob Loomis. In this episode, Gayle traces Bennett Cerf’s improbable arc from Jewish Harlem to Columbia Universit...

Paul Yamazaki has been the head buyer at the iconic City Lights bookstore in San Francisco since 1982. In this episode, Paul traces a singular life: from the music clubs of LA and the cultural ferment of late-1960s San Francisco, to more than four decades of deciding which books to shelve at one of the world’s most beloved bookstores. A longtime champion of independent presses and underrepresented...

Perminder Mann is CEO of UK & International for Simon & Schuster, a role she stepped into in May 2024 after eight years as Group CEO of Bonnier Books UK. In this episode, Perminder traces an unlikely path to the top of publishing—from a working-class immigrant family outside West London, where she didn’t own a book until she was 22, to special sales, a tour through the toy industry, and ul...

Bob Carrigan is the CEO of Audible, the world’s leading audiobook platform. In this episode, Bob describes Audible’s extraordinary growth and the company’s ambitious vision to make every book available as an audiobook in every language. He discusses the pandemic’s effect on listening habits, the landmark multicast production of the Harry Potter series, Audible’s new “Story House” pop-up in New Yor...

Ruth Dickey is the Executive Director of the National Book Foundation—the organization behind the National Book Awards, now in its 77th year. In this episode, Ruth shares the foundation’s new five-year strategic plan, which will expand programming at a moment when many arts organizations are retrenching, including providing millions of free books in public housing communities, awarding teacher fel...

Michael Carlisle is a co-founder of Inkwell Management, one of the most respected literary agencies in the business. Born of publishing parents, he became a human rights lawyer first, before he found his way to the William Morris Agency, then built his own agency before forming Inkwell Management. From William Styron to Elin Hilderbrand, Michael has been in at the beginning on an amazing set of au...

Brendan Curry has spent 24 years at W.W. Norton—the largest and oldest employee-owned publishing company. Norton is renowned for nonfiction and higher education publishing. In this episode, we discuss the rise and recent challenges of serious nonfiction, exploring how political upheaval, cultural fatigue, and fragmented digital media environments have reshaped readers’ engagement with big-idea boo...

Miwa Messer is the executive producer and host of Barnes & Noble’s beloved podcast “Poured Over,” which has released over 650 episodes in the last 5 years. Our conversation covers her journey in publisher publicity and brick and mortar bookselling, and the significant changes in book format and book discovery along the way—including events, podcasting, social media, and more.

Jon Anderson has been President and Publisher of Simon & Schuster Children’s since 2009, after a career in both publishing and bookselling that began at age 16 at a B. Dalton mall store in South Dakota. His journey through Barnes & Noble, Penguin, and Perseus to his current position is one marked by creativity, humor, and iconic books and brands, from Mad Libs to Nancy Drew.

Terry Finley is the President and CEO of Books-A-Million, a chain of over 200 bookstores in 30 states. In this episode he describes the dramatic changes in book retailing since the late 1970s, when department stores and small mall stores were major booksellers, through the superstore era and to today’s marketplace with online retailers and social media influencers. (For full transparency: Books-A-...

In a 50-year publishing career, Michael Jacobs has been at the center of a number of explosive worldwide publishing phenomena, including Harry Potter and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. He talks about the lessons of blockbuster publishing, the joys of poetry, finishing his college career at 67, his new venture, Galpón Press, and its first book, The Woodcutter's Christmas . Love the podcast? Want to suggest...

Dominique Raccah founded Sourcebooks in Chicago in 1987 and has turned it into the fastest growing, and now the largest, independent book publisher in the United States. This episode covers how she built an innovative company and a culture that seems to uniquely balance supporting authors, understanding readers, and using data to make decisions.

A writer and an editor join us to discuss a new book set in the world of publishing. Hot Desk — the debut novel from Laura Dickerman (with input from her editor brother Colin) — is a genre-spanning story. It is part rom-com, part publishing satire and part upscale book club fiction. The book spans a shared post-covid desk and two distinct eras in the book business from the heyday of the 80’s to th...

Molly Stern is a longtime editor and publisher, formerly at Penguin Random House, where she worked on countless award-winners and bestsellers including Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, and Becoming by Michelle Obama. Molly is now the founder and CEO of Zando, an innovative startup that partners with well-known figures like Sarah Jessica Parker and John Legend to lau...

As former Chairman and CEO of Hachette, Arnaud offers a candid look inside a major international publisher. Under his leadership, Hachette grew from a French-centric company to a global player, publishing authors like Barack Obama, Stephanie Meyer, Malcolm Gladwell, James Patterson, and Rick Riordan. His new venture, Les Nouveaux Éditeurs, is a nimble and editor-driven reimagining of book publishi...

Where do global bestsellers come from? We hear from Judith Curr on her fascinating worldwide publishing journey. From a one-room schoolhouse in Australia to a career full of international bestsellers like The Celestine Prophecy, The Secret , and breakout bestselling authors like Colleen Hoover and Lisa Jewell, Judith has always had an eye for the next big thing.

This episode marks the one-year anniversary of the Open Book Podcast, so we thought we would do something a little different. We often ask our guests to share their journey as readers, including the earliest books that they read that really made an impression. For this special one-year anniversary episode, we're going to listen to a number of our guests from the past year and their thoughts about...

Sally Kim is the President and Publisher of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group that includes the flagship imprint originally founded in 1837, with a catalog that boasts authors like JD Salinger, Louisa May Alcott, Malcolm Gladwell, Nelson Mandela and David Sedaris, to name a few. Sally’s journey from intern to editor and then publisher is both fascinating and comprehensiv...

James Daunt is a busy man, leading three iconic booksellers on two continents. In this episode, he shares his journey from founding a single independent bookstore in London in 1990 to rescuing and turning around the two largest bookstore chains in the English-speaking world: Waterstones in the UK and Barnes & Noble in the US.

Journalist Elizabeth Harris reports on books and the publishing industry for The New York Times. She shares her 16-year career journey from clerk to staff writer, her thoughts on the book industry, and the process of writing her first novel, How to Sleep at Night .

Andy Hunter is one of the most interesting players in the discovery and commerce of books. Andy’s career took him from mainstream cultural behemoth Disney to beloved counterculture publisher Soft Skull Press, before founding online literary communities Electric Literature and LitHub. From there, he launched the indie e-commerce platform Bookshop.org in 2020 and stewarded its exceptional growth. An...

Madeline McIntosh is a trailblazing publisher whose career spans leading roles at storied companies like Norton, Bantam Doubleday Dell, Amazon, and Penguin Random House. Madeline talks about her newest venture, Authors Equity, which just celebrated its first anniversary. Authors Equity uses a new kind of business model where publisher and author collaborate to drive a book’s success.

HarperCollins is a storied worldwide publisher with roots that go back more than 200 years, possessing a catalog of 200,000 titles from authors like Mark Twain, the Brontë sisters, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Barbara Kingsolver. Brian Murray talks about the company’s legacy of navigating changes in culture, technology and law, becoming a truly global publisher, and navigating evolving AI techn...

From India to America, self-described “accidental” entrepreneur Amandeep Kochar’s fascinating career spans LiveNation, McGraw Hill, and Baker & Taylor—the nearly 200-year-old business serving libraries with both physical books and digital services.

Jon Yaged, the CEO of Macmillan, shares his journey from grandchild of a jazz musician to publishing blockbuster books by Kristen Hannah, Matthew Perry and Rick Riordan.