At an appearance Tuesday sponsored by NYU, Jane Friedman talked to grad students and the press about her new company, Open Road Integrated Media. Friedman, who delivered the talk at The Center for Publishing at NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies, opened by saying she considered this moment one of the most exciting times to be in publishing, and then offered similar details on Open Road as she had at The Frankfurt Book Fair, where she first unveiled the project.

Friedman likened the company to a layer cake in her talk, officially dubbed "Good Reads, Smart Readers: A New View of e-Books," delineating it's different components, with one being dedicated to publishing e-books, another to self-publihing (and print-on-demand) and another, the top layer, to marketing efforts which will have an element of "digi-entertainment." Referring to that final layer, Friedman said the company will produce apps, widgets and audio, but that "developing video is our special sauce."

Open Road has already signed with two publishers--Kensington and Grove/Atlantic--to create digi-content for them. Through the deal with Kensington, Open Road president and co-founder Jeff Sharp is looking at the house's backlist for potential movie adaptations--Sharp, an established movie producer, will be doing the same for Open Road titles and has already optioned one of Open Road's lead e-book titles, William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness.

Speaking to the digi-content, Friedman said that at the recent Kensington sales conference Sharp premiered two new author videos and that the "sales rep got up and applauded." You can also get a very early taste for the kind of videos Open Road may be doing, stylistically anyway, at openroadmedia.com, where two promotional videos are currently on loop, one featuring Friedman and another featuring Sharp.

Friedman, who said the book business is "at the beginning of a revolution, not evolution," said she ultimately thinks it's a good time to be small. She said repeatedly that she thinks legacy publishers, like her former employer HarperCollins, will continue to have a tough time in the fast-changing book market. "Lots of things are broken," she said, noting that traditional publishers are still marketing their frontlist but losing sight of their backlist. Smaller companies, like Open Road--which she emphasized is a marketing company first (a "publishing marketing company")--with lower overhead and the ability to move quickly, will, she thinks, have the edge.