THE BOOKKEEPER

An engineer with a business degree, Murray entered the publishing world when it was going through a digital shift. Today, he faces another tech-tonic moment, writes Veenu Sandhu

-  Veenu Sandhu

Brian Murray never set out to lead one of the world's largest publishing houses. In fact, the first four years of his career had nothing to do with books at all-he was an engineer at a company that built training simulators for nuclear power plants. "I was not an English major. I had studied physics and engineering at a university in Washington, DC," says the tall American.

While the tech job was fascinating, business is where his interest lay, which led him to Columbia Business School in New York, where he found himself drawn to the intersection of media and technology.

It was the mid-1990s, and the internet was just beginning to disrupt traditional industries. Murray joined a consulting firm that advised media companies on navigating this brave new digital world. One of his assignments involved working with the media major Hearst. The publishing industry at the time was still figuring out what to do with CDROMs, CompuServe, AOL, and Prodigy --much like today, when it is trying to fathom the obscure world of artificial intelligence (AI).

"I remember sitting in a meeting in 1994 or 1995 with Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen (who had just developed the Mosaic browser)," he recalls. "They demonstrated the Rolling Stone magazine in HTML. It was an intriguing glimpse into the future of digital media."