Page 182 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

Marco Ferrario: I left Mondadori, Italy’s biggest publishing house, in 2008, a few months after Kindle came on the market in the United States I decided to ditch a traditional publishing company where I had worked for sixteen years, spending much of this time in charge of the Internet and multimedia projects and a few imprints I soon realised that innovation in a well-established organisation was much more difficult than in a startup: we are so lucky to be experiencing a historic revolution in the publishing industry and I had no intention of spending the rest of my career protecting my company from it I wanted to join in this revolution and be part of it Bookrepublic was set up after I spent a year in Europe and the United States developing a business model, seeking investors and doing a lot of personal work to stop thinking like a manager and become an entrepreneurThe trade of publishing books and, chiefly, what is going to become of this trade continues to be my main interest; therefore we are working in different fields, as we are aggregators, retailers and publishers with two international digital imprints. I firmly support the creation of global networks for sharing experiences and ideas; in 2011 we started up IfBookThen in Milan, an international conference on digital publishing increasingly focused on digital storytelling and “stories outside books”; and last year we set up Bookrepublic Content Agency to offer corporate brands the best content