GiantChair appoints Joe Esposito CEO

[Terry Ehling <ehling@cornell.edu>]

[Of interest to the list. -TE]

Paris / New York / San Francisco
22 January 2010

GiantChair, an independent provider of technology and services 
for the scholarly and trade publishing communities, is pleased to 
announce the appointment of Joseph J. Esposito as CEO.

Over the next twelve months Joe will spearhead the launch of the 
Scholars Catalog <www.scholarscatalog.org>, a platform and 
service designed specifically for university presses and 
not-for-profit scholarly publishers; lead efforts to augment 
GiantChair's current strategy in Europe, where the majority of 
GiantChair's operations are based; develop a strengthened 
marketing effort in North America; and discuss new forms of 
partnerships with technical companies, publishers, booksellers, 
and libraries.

Prior to joining GiantChair, Joe ran his own independent 
consultancy.  His clients over the years have ranged across the 
publishing and software industries and include for-profit and 
not-for-profit organizations.  Some his representative clients 
are Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Atypon Systems, DeepDyve, Simon & 
Schuster, Scholastic, The American National Standards Institute, 
JSTOR, The University of California Press, The Center for 
Research Libraries, and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 
Joe has also participated in projects underwritten by 
philanthropies, including the Hewlett, MacArthur, and Mellon 
Foundations.

Joe began his publishing career at Rutgers University Press.  He 
has held executive positions at Simon & Schuster and Random 
House, was President of Merriam-Webster, and CEO of Encyclopaedia 
Britannica, where he initiated the first online encyclopedia 
project, Britannica Online.  In the Internet world, he formerly 
served as CEO of Tribal Voice; he learned the consulting trade as 
CEO of SRI Consulting.  Many of Joe's writings on the 
intersection of publishing and digital media can be found in 
First Monday, the Journal of Electronic Publishing, and The 
Scientist.

About GiantChair
http://giantchair.com

GiantChair's tools and team help scholarly and academic 
publishers master their own metadata and maximize direct sales of 
both paper and digital books. The GiantChair web-based software 
platform provides publishers and distributors with an 
Onix-compliant relational database, coupled with a collaborative 
back office and an e-commerce enabled web site.  The underlying 
structure focuses on meta-identifiers for works, each having 
unlimited physical and digital manifestations, thus providing a 
long-term internet home address for each title. The platform's 
integration with Google's Book Search program keeps publishers on 
the cutting edge of the semantic web, thus profiting from 
unprecedented traffic of both current, as well as forthcoming, 
blended search query results.

CONTACT: Joe Esposito <espositoj@giantchair.com>