We've been losing the foundation of our customer base because their eyesight is getting worse and the books are getting harder and harder to read.

Vision is obviously an issue for baby boomers. If you make the books more readable, then some of the audience who have moved to larger formats will return.

If you go back 20 years, the mass-market paperback was really driving the business. As long as we have to continue to pay what we do for brand-name authors, we need a healthier paperback format to make it work.

This innovative publication strategy takes the e-book from the realm of novelty and directly into the very mainstream of today's culture. And it reaffirms the publisher-author relationship at a moment when it is fashionable to predict its demise.

Most of our adult imprints went after the market on a title-by-title basis. But this group came in and proposed a guerrilla movement to find content and match it to the audience.

Somebody told me it was frightening how much topsoil we are losing each year, but I told that story around the campfire and nobody got scared