Gus Balbontin, Lonely Planet
Gus is a strategy and innovation expert. He specializes in leading complex cross-business transformation initiatives that require significant operational restructures with minimum disruption to the business. He has a knack for incubating and integrating new products, market opportunities, platforms and technologies into existing businesses. Gus is playing a lead role in Lonely Planet’s transformation from print publisher into a multiformat publisher.

©

Jason Cooper
is Digital and Enterprise Development Director at Faber and Faber where he is engaged in the strategic development of new businesses and company innovation. He founded Faber's writing programme, the Faber Academy, and its award-winning digital publishing division. He has worked for several notable publishers and literary agencies and significant experience as a commissioning editor and licensing intellectual property across publishing, film, the press and other media.

©

Thomas Mosch was born in 1965 and studied Electrical Engineering at the Technische University Berlin. He received his Engineering degree in 1994.

Mosch started his professional career as a project leader in the e-learning, e-commerce and multimedia departments of Deutsche Post Consult GmbH, a subsidiary of Deutsche Post AG. In 1999, Mosch became director of marketing for LuraTech Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrttechnologie und Multimedia mbH, Berlin and Palo Alto. There he was in charge of introducing innovative picture processing systems to the market. Afterwards, he undertook the position of executive vice president at Scopeland Software GmbH.

Starting in October 2001, Mosch headed BITKOM’s mid-sized enterprises and start-ups division which he extensively helped to build. In October 2005, Thomas Mosch was promoted to the executive board and since then has led the Politics and Law unit. Economic and innovation policies, telecommunications and media regulations, legal affairs and public contracts, taxes and finance, foreign trade, labor and education, trade shows, marketing, medium-sized enterprises, start-ups and research funding are his focus points. Since 2008, Mosch is the managing director of BITKOM Research GmbH.

©

Edward Nawotka
is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, the online news service for the international publishing industry. Established in 2009, the publication has become the preeminent forum for discussion and debate of global publishing issues, earning it the moniker “the BBC of the book world.”

A former bookseller and international news correspondent, Ed has covered the book business exclusively since 2000, first as an editor for Publishers Weekly and then as a columnist for Bloomberg News. A prolific essayist and critic, he continues to contribute to a wide variety of publications—commercial, trade and academic—at home and abroad.

Ed holds degrees from Boston College, Columbia University and University College Dublin. He is a lecturer for the Yale University Publishing Course and serves on the advisory board of the University of Texas Libraries, where he helped establish the University of Texas Human Rights Documentation Initiative, which digitizes and preserves the video, audio and documentary testimonies of the victims and perpetrators of human rights abuses. He lives in Houston.

©

He holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was also a lecturer. He returned to Spain where he taught at the University of Barcelona.
Master Degree on Publishing at the Universitat Pompeu i Fabra in Barcelona, Cristóbal Pera was selected as Frankfurt Fair Fellow in 1999. After that experience he changed Academia for Publishing and begun working at Galaxia Gutenberg as editor in 2000. Later, he became literary director of the imprint Debate at Random House Mondadori in Barcelona. In 2006 he was appointed editorial director of the group in Mexico.
Since then, he has focused on developing strong editorial teams and finding non fiction books that profoundly impact Mexican politics and Latin American literature, while working closely with authors like Enrique Krauze or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
He has lectured about Latin American literature at Yale, Princeton or Virginia Universities, and about the present and future of the book.
Cristobal is also the author of a novel, La bahia suspendida, and an essay, Modernistas en Paris, and numerous articles and translations.

©

studied English Literature and Art History at Cologne and Glasgow/UK. His doctoral dissertation covered the theory and history of fantasy literature, and he is known as an authority on this subject. His academic interest is in genre typology and the theory of the fantastic. A full-time fiction editor for more than twenty-five years, he published Ken Follett, David Baldacci and other international bestseller writers in Germany, besides German authors such as Wolfgang Hohlbein. He is also known as a writer, translator, and illustrator. In 2011, he joined Bastei Entertainment, the digital media division of Bastei Lübbe Publishing, where he is now as Editorial Director E-Publishing developing multi- and crossmedia content and new modes of storytelling for the digital age.

©

Sabine Schubert is Senior Consultant with Kirchner + Robrecht. M.A. in history, English literature and American studies. From 1987-1996 Editor non-fiction at dtv, Knaur Taschenbuchverlag and Goldmann. 1996-2000 publisher at mi and mvg in Landsberg. 2000-2003 CEO of the publishing group Dornier. Training as systematic process manager with a focus on designing and accompanying change processes. 2004-2009 international implementation of software projects with Klopotek in the area of contracts, rights & licences. Specialised in publishing processes, distribution and marketing as well as content management. Since 2010 Senior consultant with Kirchner + Robrecht in Berlin.

©

Kate Wilson started her publishing career in the UK after studying English at Oxford University by selling rights for Faber and Faber. She was Publisher and Managing Director of Macmillan Children’s Books from 1994 to 2004, and then she ran Scholastic in the UK between 2004 and 2009. After a (very!) brief period in adult publishing as CEO of Headline, part of the Hachette Group, she founded Nosy Crow, an independent publisher of children’s books and children’s apps, in February 2010. As a parent and a publisher, she is interested in literacy on the page and on screen and in how generations of digital natives may choose to consume text.

©