Squires takes over the CEO role from Brian Jacobs, who founded the company nine years ago.

Akademos also announced that Kohlberg Ventures, which invested in the company three years ago, has increased its stake. It has now put a total of $5 million into the venture.

Akademos sets up “white label” bookstores that sell both physical and digital texts; it also runs textbookx, a direct-to-consumer retail site.

Squires, whose last job was the interim CEO at the Next Issue Media e-magazine joint venture, says he’ll be focused on helping the company work with open source textbooks.

Now it does. The JV has appointed Morgan Guenther to the post. Who?

From the press release:

Mr. Guenther served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of AirPlay, a wireless entertainment services company. Prior to this position, he was with TiVo Inc., as President from 2001 through 2003 and before that as Senior Vice President of Business Development and Revenue Operations. Mr. Guenther sits on several other technology company boards and is also a former partner at Paul Hastings Janofsky & Walker LLP.

John Squires, the Time Warner (TWX) executive who helped spearhead the JV last year, had openly campaigned for the job. But outside of his former colleagues at Time Inc., most magazine executives assumed he wouldn’t get the gig, for whatever reason.

Bob Sauerberg, the Condé Nast distribution exec tasked with speaking on behalf of the JV partners–Condé, Time Inc., News Corp. (NWS), Meredith (MDP), Hearst–explains the group’s choice with…delicacy. Squires brought “huge enthusiasm” to the job as an interim leader, he says. But “as we now head into execution, and working through how to do it, we felt that Morgan…was the right guy.” Etc.

It is worth noting that Guenther will be based in San Francisco, which is on the other side of the continent from his corporate backers, but is presumably next door to all the tech companies the JV will have to deal with. So that’s encouraging.

The discouraging part: The market for this stuff is moving very quickly, and the JV doesn’t seem to have moved at all for the past six months.

Not true! says Sauerberg: Squires, along with consulting firm Oliver Wyman, has been studying the market, and those findings are supposed to be presented at an industry conference tomorrow. Publishing sources also tell me that the JV has done some actual technical work as well, though it’s unclear if we’ll ever see it.

Okay. Here’s the bigger issue: Even in the best-case scenario, this kind of media joint venture works only if the partners behind it try really, really hard to make it work. Hulu itself is a great product, but that JV is now struggling to balance the competing interests of its network TV owners.

And in this case, it’s unclear whether Next Issue Media’s owners really believe they need a single aggregator to market and distribute their stuff, a la iTunes in music and Hulu and YouTube for video.

Most telling point: Next Issue Media doesn’t have exclusive rights to distribute its partners’ stuff, as Hulu does. That is: Any publisher is free to set up its own deals with Apple (AAPL) or Amazon (AMZN) or anyone else.

So you can very easily imagine a scenario where Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos applies leverage to cut a separate deal with Time or Condé, etc. And once that starts happening…well, you can see how this one could play out.

Perhaps Squires was lucky not to get the gig.

There is an information-free press release at the bottom of this page, but the story is more or less the one I’ve been telling you about for a couple months:

• Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc and four other publishers–Condé Nast, Meredith, Hearst and News Corp. (NWS)–will be equity partners in the JV.
• For now, Time Inc. digital boss John Squires will run the unnamed JV, which is conducting a CEO search, and he would like the job on a permanent basis.
• The JV may take on other strategic or financial partners, though Squires thinks it can go forward as is without worrying about antitrust issues.
• All of this is conceptual at this stage; the companies now need to go about the business of actually assembling technology that will let them do this.
• All of those digital products that the JV’s publishers have been showing off–Condé Nast’s digital reader, built with Adobe (ADBE); Time Inc.’s mock-up of a digital magazine, etc.–are all well and good, but Squires thinks that eventually the JV will need to settle on a single standard. That’s one of the main points, really: “One would imagine a sort of common publishing infrastructure, because we don’t want to spend money five different ways.”

Some people don’t like my description of this as “Hulu for Magazines,” but let me spell it out for them: Like Hulu, this is a joint venture of content owners that is designed to control distribution and sale of their product instead of ceding that to digital powerhouses like Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN). Easy to understand, right?

The question is: Will Apple and Amazon, in particular, let others control the sale of digital media to their devices via Apple’s and Amazon’s storefronts? Publishing executives I’ve talked think that Apple may end up being receptive to the idea, but Amazon is clearly going to be a problem.

Squires notes hopefully that Amazon already lets publishers sell physical magazine subscriptions via the retailer, but that’s meaningless: Amazon has clearly designed the Kindle and surrounding infrastructure to be an end-to-end experience, and so far, the company has been able to get publishers to play along. But if Squires’s JV ends up working as planned, publishers will have enough clout to set their own terms.

LEADING PUBLISHERS FORM VENTURE TO OFFER CONSUMERS NEW DIGITAL STOREFRONT AND PORTABLE READING EXPERIENCE

Initiative Will also Offer Marketers Rich Array of Innovative Advertising Opportunities

New York, NY, December 8, 2009 – Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corporation and Time Inc. today jointly announced that they have entered into an independent venture to develop open standards for a new digital storefront and related technology that will allow consumers to enjoy their favorite media content on portable digital devices.

The goal of this digital initiative is fourfold, to create: a highly featured common reading application capable of rendering the distinctive look and feel of each publication; a robust publishing platform optimized for multiple devices, operating systems and screen sizes; a consumer storefront offering an extensive selection of reading options; and a rich array of innovative advertising opportunities.

Beyond the publications of the equity partners, the venture will welcome other publishers to offer their content via this new digital platform. Publishers will derive revenue from content and advertising sales, as well as from print subscriptions.

“For the consumer, this digital initiative will provide access to an extraordinary selection of engaging content products, all customized for easy download on the device of their choice, including smartphones, e-readers and laptops,” explained John Squires, the venture’s interim managing director. “Once purchased, this content will be ‘unlocked’ for consumers to enjoy anywhere, anytime, on any platform.”

For publishers and advertisers, the venture will offer an attractive, cost-efficient, consumer-focused environment. Advertisers will be able to utilize innovative formats that benefit from the highly engaging, interactive nature of this new medium. In addition to entirely new magazine and newspaper reading experiences, content selections may ultimately include books, comic books, blogs and other media.

For the hardware, software and retail industries, the initiative will provide dynamic new business opportunities by organizing a library of quality content with a common format and technical specifications. The venture partners represent an unduplicated audience of 144.6 million according to Mediamark Research & Intelligence (MRI).  By the end of 2010, Forrester Research estimates that 10 million e-readers will be sold in the U.S., and according to m:Metrics (comScore), there will be over 50 million smartphones in the U.S. by the end of 2010.

Squires has spent the past few months convincing other publishers to join a new joint venture aimed at a market that doesn’t really exist yet–magazine-like publications to be delivered via e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s rumored tablet.

The idea: The new company, which will operate independently from the publishers that invest in it, will create a digital storefront where consumers can purchase and manage their subscriptions, which can be delivered to any device. The pitch: Control a direct relationship with consumers while gaining leverage with heavyweights like Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN).

Industry executives briefed on Squires’s plan say it has been well received by Time Inc.’s peers and that several major publishers, including Hearst and Condé Nast, are expected to sign on for the JV, which isn’t scheduled to debut until 2010. No comment from Hearst, Condé Nast or Time Inc., a unit of Time Warner (TWX).

Many of the venture’s big details have yet to be hammered down. At one point, for instance, Time Inc. had explored the idea of including newspapers in the new company’s offering, sources say. The JV may also want to include a noncontent partner as an investor, as Hulu did with Providence Equity and as Vevo, the “Hulu for music” JV that Universal Music is creating with Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, plans to do. That approach is supposed to appease antitrust regulators’ worries about a group of content companies banding together.

But the rough outlines of Squires’s plan are attractive enough to publishers, who are hopeful that mobile devices like the Kindle will create a new market for them. And if that market does show up, they want to make sure they’re the ones in charge of sales and distribution. That’s been a huge problem for the music industry, whose digital sales are essentially controlled by Apple. And it has already cropped up as a point of contention with Amazon, which currently handles sales for all content delivered via its Kindle reader.

Other selling points for the JV: The ability to set standards for mobile content and the ability to integrate advertising into the publications. One thing the company isn’t supposed to do: Create an e-reader itself.

The takeaway, via a Time Inc. presentation that has circulated among publishers: “our destiny with readers, advertisers and distributors … [is] in our hands.”

Of course, there are plenty of hurdles facing the joint venture, starting with the fact that media joint ventures have a checkered record at best (though Hearst and Condé, for instance, have already partnered on Comag, a wholesale distribution company). But there are bigger problems for Squires and company. For instance:

• They’ll have to convince consumers who already have billing relationships with Amazon, Apple and other vendors to sign up with yet another service.
• They’ll  have to convince device makers to play along with the strategy, which runs counter to many of their own plans. Both Amazon and Apple, for instance, have intentionally created closed systems that give them control of both devices and distribution.
• They’ll have to create content consumers want to buy. The new product can’t simply be a digital version of the magazines they’re already printing: That’s already available on the Web, and consumers have shown almost no interest in paying for it, and advertisers haven’t fully embraced it either.

So what exactly will the JV be selling? That’s probably the most difficult question for publishers to answer, made even more difficult because they don’t know what capabilities the e-readers of the future will boast. Apple for instance, refuses to even acknowledge to Time Inc. executives that it plans to produce a tablet device, let alone provide them with specs.

But publishers feel they’ve got nothing to lose by trying. “We know that traditional magazines are going away, and that magazines on the Web don’t work,” says a publishing executive working on the plan. “But this gives us a chance to serve the reader who will pay for content, and provide advertising that really works. Can you think of a better idea?”

My pal Owen Thomas, late of Valleywag, has published a piece for NBC’s Bay Area local site that suggests that Time Inc. wants to get into the hardware business and produce its own e-reader.

That’s something other publishers, like Hearst and News Corp. (NWS), are actually doing or have at least mulled. But multiple sources familiar with the Time Warner (TWX) unit’s thinking say that’s not the case here.

But the publisher certainly is thinking about ways to create specialized content for e-reader devices and about the best way to distribute that content.

Time Warner executives have talked about this openly for many months–see Time Inc. digital guru John Squires’s comments in June–and Thomas appears to have gotten his hands on an internal document that addresses the same topic.

Most intriguing, according to Thomas’s read of the documents: A Hulu-like spinoff that would do…something:

The presentation concludes that Time Inc. and other partners should form a new, jointly owned company. Time Inc. might spin out its Maghound service, a service which lets consumers bundle multiple magazines together into a single monthly subscription, to form the base of the joint venture. The company is also considering acquiring other businesses to jumpstart the venture.

No comment from Time Inc.

But I do know that Time Inc.’s executives have met with other publishers about collaborating on e-reader standards, etc. And I do know that Time Inc. executives  think a special version of their print products, designed specifically for e-readers, is a good idea. Most everyone I talk to in magazine publishing, in fact, believes this.

And I understand why they do. In their minds, the e-reader versions of their products function just about the same way magazines do: People pay to read them and advertisers pay to distribute their messages through them. And–this part is crucially important, from their perspective–publishers retain control of distribution and the billing relationship with their customers.

That relationship gets obliterated in Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle model: Publishers wholesale the stuff to Jeff Bezos, who deals with consumers directly. This is also one of the music industry’s big regrets about the digital age. Even though labels are selling their stuff on the Web, via Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes and others, they still don’t have direct relationships with its customers.

Which is why publishers are desperately hoping that they’ll be able to push their stuff through someone other than Jeff Bezos. On the surface, at least, it looks as though their wishes are being met: A bevy of Kindle competitors–Sony (SNE), Plastic Logic, iRex, etc.–is surfacing. Surely one or more of those will figure out how to offer publishers the terms they want.

But even if one or more of the Kindle clones succeeds, print publishers still have a core problem: They need to convince consumers that content–in any form, on any device–is worth paying for. That will work in some cases, but for many it’s going be a very hard slog.

While Squires solves that riddle, he’ll leave his day job as head of the “news business unit” (Time, Fortune, Money, etc.). In his place will be… Moore, who is already running the company’s style group.

I chatted briefly via email with Squires, who is good-natured about the assignment. But I have to take issue with him (and everyone else who uses this example) re iTunes. Apple (AAPL) didn’t prove that people are willing to pay for content online–we’d already seen that (at The Wall Street Journal, among other examples). Apple proved that people are willing to pay for portions–that would be songs–of products that were previously only sold in bundles–that would be CDs.

You can debate whether this was terrible for the music industry or simply the least-bad option. But I don’t think it makes sense to compare the experience of the music industry with news and other Web content that people aren’t used to paying for in any form.

Here’s my Q&A with Squires:

MediaMemo: I’m struck by Ann’s “genie” reference–are we meant to take that in a tongue-in-cheek way, or do you folks really think you can put the free-content genie back in the bottle? Or am I misinterpreting that?

John Squires: We’re not unrealistic about the challenge, but iTunes showed people will pay for something attractively packaged and fairly priced that they once got for free….We also wanted to get your attention. So I guess we’re genies.

MM: Do you imagine that Time Inc. will be taking content that’s currently available for free online and putting it behind a pay wall? Or are you more focused on creating new products you can charge for?

JS: This is part of what we’ll be testing. Certainly some online content will remain free because we’re eager to keep our large online audiences (over 26 million Nielsen uniques) and successful advertising model. Some other online content may be subscription-based. And the content we create for mobile readers will be a completely new experience, with different design and functions that we think consumers will want to pay for.

MM: Haven’t heard Time Inc.’s voice in the “Google isn’t playing fair” chorus. How much, if any, energy are you spending on getting the search engine to help you/take less from you, etc.?

JS: We’re not part of that chorus at the moment.

MM: Is this a permanent assignment or will you go back to News at some point?

JS: We’ll see what comes out of this assignment.

And here’s the companywide memo from Moore:

To:       Time Inc. Employees

From:   Ann Moore

Re: How to Put the Genie Back Into the Bottle; Special Assignment for John Squires

It won’t be a revelation to any of you that the publishing business is changing rapidly. While print magazines are not going away, and while we have built vibrant websites with over 26 million unique visitors and 750 million pages views each month, it’s increasingly clear that finding the right digital business model is crucial for the future of our business. We need to develop a strategy for the portable digital world and to refine our views on paid content.

Given the magnitude of the opportunity, I have asked John Squires to take on a new role and devote his full time efforts this summer to developing the best business plan for the future. John’s qualifications for this assignment are ideal. He has a strong background in consumer marketing and digital content and has stature in the publishing industry, as well as with digital software and hardware companies. It is likely we will be seeking partners and allies in our quest to ‘put the genie back into the bottle’.

As many of you know, we are currently pursuing four related initiatives:

1.    Evolving our current website businesses by identifying and developing consumer revenue streams.

2.    Accelerating the creation of applications for smartphone platforms.

3.    Developing new products and business models for portable digital readers.

4.    Exploring partnerships with other publishers to develop the optimal retail store for our digital products.

John will need the support of many, including Consumer Marketing, Legal, Strategy and Business Development, and the Time Inc. titles. Please pitch in with all your resources available when he calls.

During this assignment, similar to the role I’m playing at the Style and Entertainment Group, I will assume responsibility for the News Business Unit.

A.M.

Or more accurately, it’s going to start tinkering with the notion.

Time Inc. EVP John Squires, who floated the idea with reporters yesterday, teased it out a bit for Silicon Alley Insider: “Certain content area of our sites will try some pay tests, just to see what will drive consumers to get out their wallets or subscribe to one of our magazines.”

PaidContent’s Staci Kramer got a Time Inc. official to provide an equally vague take: “There is nothing specific to point to now but you can expect some experiments within six to eight months. We’re also looking closely at devices and applications and pricing and business models associated with those.”

The upshot: You’re going to see more and more publishers at least fiddle with the notion of getting readers to pay for something online. The New York Times (NYT), for instance, has been publicly musing about this for some time now.

And bear in mind that lots of publishers never stopped trying to get consumers to pay up. Disney’s ESPN.com (DIS) for instance, has sold an “Insiders” premium subscription alongside its free stuff for many years.

And sports may be a natural place for Time Inc. to try an upsell. Yahoo Sports, which charges a premium for its fantasy sports offering, has seen annual revenue increases of more than 20% for years — including this year — according to Jim Pitaro, who runs Yahoo’s (YHOO) sports and entertainment group.

Meanwhile, here’s a way to get a sense of what Time Inc. really wanted to talk about yesterday — the decks they used in their presentations. In order, the slides are from Squires; Time.com managing editor Josh Tryangiel; CNNMoney.com SVP Jonathan Shar; EW.com managing editor Cyndi Stivers;  and SI Digital VP Ken Fuchs.

TIME_DigitalShowcase_031809 – Get more Business Documents

CNNMoney_DigitalShowcase_031809 – Get more Business Documents

Squires_DigitalShowcase_031809 – Get more Business Documents

CNNMoney_DigitalShowcase_031809 – Get more Business Documents

EW_DigitalShowcase_031809 – Get more Business Documents

SIGOLF_DigitalShowcase_031809 – Get more Business Documents

MediaMemo readers, my family and my conscience have been nagging me to write something upbeat once in a while–as opposed to the barrage of layoff stories and other grim posts I’ve been scribbling for the past couple months.

So, here you are: The lengthy layoffs at Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. are over. Just about.

This information comes directly from Executive Vice President John Squires, who wasn’t planning on talking about layoffs when I saw him today–he had invited me and some other folks over to look at the company’s digital offerings–but was polite about it when I asked.

Here’s our conversation from this afternoon:

Me: So are the layoffs done?

Squires: [Pause] Yes. Pretty much. Anything else through the end of the year are outliers.

Me: So, if you work at Time Inc. and you still have a job, you’re safe through the end of the year?

Squires: Yes, you should be.”

Before anyone drowns in holiday cheer, a Time Inc. executive I double-checked with stressed that Squires had qualified his statement a couple different ways. Noted. But in late 2008, this qualifies as good news. So enjoy.

[Image Credit: Valleywag blogger Owen Thomas's champagne, via Brian Solis]