Jane Friedman says her new mantra is "back to the future."

Speaking at a brown-bag gathering at the Center for Publishing at NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies yesterday, Friedman, the CEO and co-founder of Open Road Integrated Media, said her philosophy was simple: "Good publishing is good business."

Friedman was invited to speak about her new venture, Open Road, an e-book marketing and publishing company she recently launched with producer Jeff Sharp with funding from Kohlberg Ventures. (A September SEC filing by the company put its funding at $3 million.) In the last few weeks as Friedman and Sharp have done the rounds, Open Road, which has yet to release a title, has garnered coverage from Publishers Weekly, the Hollywood Reporter, and AOL Daily Finance.

Friedman had been CEO of News Corp.'s HarperCollins until June 2008 when she resigned—or was pushed out—after 11 years at the company. Before that, she was an executive vice president of Random House, where she started out in 1967.

So powerful a presence was Friedman that when a friend threw her a "non-retirement" party in 2008, the guests posed for a photo (which ran in New York magazine) wearing masks of her face.

Friedman's departure from her longtime perch was just one part of a year and a half that saw a reorganization of Random House, layoffs at Houghton Mifflin, HarperCollins, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, Penguin UK, and many, many others. There was also the introduction of the Kindle DX, with fixed pricing by Amazon of $9.99 for most e-books, to the chagrin of many in the industry, including Hachette's Arnaud Nourry (whose company held Ted Kennedy's best-selling memoir, True Compass, from digital release), as well as the Nook, and other e-readers that are chipping away at the sale of hardcovers and paperbacks. Add to that the ongoing negotiations between Google and the Authors Guild and declining book sales, and you've got a messy (occasionally even frightening) industry upending moment for publishers.

With this crisis in the background, Friedman's 15-minute presentation and nearly hour-long Q&A session put her new company's mission in stark relief. Friedman said she and her partners intend to market digital versions (and some print-on-demand copies) of publishers' backlist catalogs as well as originals ("e-riginals," in Friedman's turn of phrase) using videos, social media, and DVD-like extras. Among the first authors whose work Open Road is trying to bring to market in this way: William Styron, Pat Conroy, and Dame Iris Murdoch. Friedman said Open Road was "entertaining the notion of a thousand books" and considering prices comparable to those of paperbacks.

She hopes to do this with a few innovations she says publishers should have adopted years ago, like an end to the interminable nine-month-long gestation period it sometimes takes for a completed manuscript to make it to a bookstore. (Not Sarah Palin's Going Rogue, of course, which hit bookstores yesterday after just four months of writing and editing.) Another fix would be to give books longer windows of promotion—and bring them back for repositioning as events warrant—instead of the six-week shelf life a new book is granted before disappearing into the black hole of a publisher's back catalog. Friedman also emphasized "shorter books…that can catch a market very fast because they're timely," including nonfiction titles.

In this, Friedman echoed Tina Brown, who recently announced a deal to expand some of the content from the Barry Diller-backed Daily Beast into quickie e-books in partnership with Perseus. (In fact, Open Road and the Beast share the same design and software shop: Code and Theory.)

As far as those e-riginals go, Friedman had some novel ideas (no pun intended) for those books as well: "No advances. A very good profit sharing. The way we see it, the holder of the copyright is giving the text and we are giving the marketing."

"This marketing platform that we are building will cost well over a million dollars," she continued. "And it's going to be as state of the art as it can be today, and it will definitely evolve."