Open Road Integrated Media
American digital media company
Open Road Integrated Media or ORIM (stylized as OR/M and also called Open Road) is a digital media company in New York City that was created by Jane Friedman and Jeffrey Sharp in 2009 with a focus on publishing ebook editions of older works of literature and nonfiction. In addition to its ebook publishing business, Open Road Integrated Media is the parent company of book publisher Open Road Media and content brands Early Bird Books, The Lineup, The Archive, Murder & Mayhem, A Love So True, and The Portalist.
Publishing veteran David Steinberger and an investment group including Abry Partners, MEP Capital, and Grove Atlantic acquired the company in 2021, and Steinberger was named CEO in 2022.
History
Former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman and film producer Jeffrey Sharp launched Open Road Integrated Media with the goal of bringing backlist books back to life in digital formats and partnering with writers of contemporary and classic works. The Open Road Media catalog includes authors such as William Styron, Pat Conroy, Joan Didion, Samuel R. Delany, Alice Walker, John Ashbery, Robin McKinley, Michael Chabon, Sherman Alexie, Pearl S. Buck, Elizabeth Lynn and Dee Brown.
In 2011, HarperCollins filed a copyright infringement suit against Open Road over the ebook edition of children's novel Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George. The suit disputed whether book contracts written before the existence of ebooks granted publishers digital rights or whether they were retained by the author. In March 2014, the New York district court judge ruled in favor of HarperCollins, stating that the contract language included digital rights.
After acquiring the content of independent publishers E-Reads and Premier Digital in 2014, and signing deals with other publishers and authors, the Open Road Media catalog expanded to 10,000 titles by 2015.
Media veteran Paul Slavin joined the company as president in 2015 and was named CEO in 2016.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Open Road Integrated Media” as american digital media company. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as american digital media company. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24914700. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2009, 2021, 2022 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Open Road Integrated Media” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.