Jason Epstein worked in book publishing for more than 40 years. He was editorial director of Random House and founded Anchor Books, the New York Review of Books, the Library of America, and the Readers Catalog. Now in retirement, he wants to digitally reconstruct publishing, as digitization is re-creating the music industry.

I became a publisher by accident. When I entered Columbia College in 1945, I was only 17, but I found myself surrounded by veterans in their 20s, some still in their flight jackets and peacoats, many of them married, some with infants. Most of them were in a hurry to find careers and get on with their lives. Some, however, were incipient scholars, and I was fascinated by their worldly talk of Marvell and Donne, Pascal and Voltaire, James and Proust, and Joyce and Eliot. Some of my elders became my friends. For four years we formed an intense coterie of which I was the chief beneficiary because I joined it knowing nothing and acquired from it the rudiments of an education. I had no thought of a job, much less a career in business, certainly not one in book publishing. Thus it did not occur to me that my friends, thanks to the GI Bill, belonged to a large, unprecedented, and undiscovered market for serious books -- a new phenomenon in the cultural and commercial life of the United States.