RosettaBooks LLC

Arthur Klebanoff is a co-founder and CEO of RosettaBooks, a leading independent e-book publisher.

Rosetta licenses top quality titles directly from authors when they control the electronic rights (typically titles whose publication dates pre-date the active use of the Internet) or from Publishers with author approval if the contract granted the publisher electronic rights.

Rosetta's first list of approximately 100 titles was released in March 2001 - including titles by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Winston Churchill and Virginia Woolf. Random House promptly sued Rosetta and Arthur Klebanoff personally claiming that electronic rights to books like Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and William Styron's Sophie's Choice had been licensed to Random House by the authors decades ago even though the contracts had no specific provisions to this effect.

The litigation became one of the most followed lawsuits in the publishing community in many years. The Association of American Publishers joined Random House. The Authors Guild and the Association of Agents' Representatives (which had never jointly supported a position in 75 years) supported Rosetta.

Random House lost in Federal District Court in its effort to secure an injunction against Rosetta - that loss was front page news in the New York Times and covered around the world. Random House appealed and lost unanimously in the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Rosetta worked out a settlement with Random House which resulted in the first major group of titles licensed for e-books to an independent publisher - all with author approval - and with a public corporate commitment that Random House would consider third party e-book licenses in the same manner it considered other subsidiary rights (book clubs, paperback, audio book, large print, etc.) Authors with titles who were part of the settlement included Toni Morrison, Pat Conroy, John Updike, Gore Vidal and Rex Stout.

Rosetta went on to work out a similarly structured license with Farrar, Straus & Giroux for such authors as I. B. Singer, Alexander Solzhntisyn and Carlos Fuentes.

Arthur Klebanoff recruited an Advisory Committee for Rosetta to advocate the broader use of e-books. Its members include Bill Bradley, educational policy expert Chester Finn, sociologist Nathan Glazer, architecture critic Paul Goldberger, presidential scholar Stephen Hess, Kennedy School leader Marvin Kalb, Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Kennedy and political scientist James Q. Wilson.

Since its launch in March 2001, Rosetta has been part of a number of industry "firsts":

The first time limited e-book promotion (with Adobe) - Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None - offered for ten hours of use for $1. Worldwide publicity resulted.

The first demonstration for libraries (2002 ALA Convention with Adobe) of a subscription offer for e-books with unlimited download, time limited use of each title. The New York Times covered this prominently.

The first e-book "packed in a box" with a PDA - Palm's special graduation offer of a device including a "free" copy of The Graduate.

The first publisher to recognize that e-books could and should be branded on their jackets - and that electronic jacket present different opportunities and problems than printed jackets.

With its relatively small title list, Rosetta has nonetheless achieved major title placements with Microsoft for its promotions of MS Reader and frequent placements with Palm for home page promotions for Palm Digital.

Rosetta is also a leader in the adoption of e-books for the library and school market as recently covered in the Wall Street Journal.