Jane Friedman

Jane Friedman is a publishing executive who was president and chief executive officer of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide from 1997 to 2008 and later became co-founder of Open Road Integrated Media, a company that sells and markets ebooks. Born to a Jewish family, she earned a bachelor's degree in English from New York University in 1967. She worked at Random House, where she became an executive vice president and founded and presided over Random House Audio Publishing, the first audio books division of a trade publisher, then served as executive vice president of the Knopf Publishing Group and publisher of Vintage Books before moving to HarperCollins. She is credited with inventing the author's tour, now a staple of the industry. In 2011 she secured 8 million dollars of funding for Open Road, and she has served on the boards of the Association of American Publishers and Yale University Press.