An interview with Georgia Lea

With 8,000+ global publishers now choosing to partner with Kortext, we spoke to Georgia Lea to find out more about content acquisition, working collaboratively, and the opportunities ahead.

Meet Georgia

Georgia joined Kortext in April 2024, bringing a wealth of experience from the digital content sector.

‘I started in Gardners Books’ digital content department,’ she says. In this role, Georgia was responsible for ‘all day-to-day publisher relations activities, working on eBooks and digital audio’.

Her job included content acquisition, managing existing publisher clients, and acting as a liaison between publishers, Askews & Holts and Browns Books for Students.

Georgia moved to Mare Nostrum Group where she ‘represented Gallup Press in the UK and Ireland for three years’. She was then promoted to Digital Content Manager, taking on responsibility for ‘their eBook business across a catalogue of more than 30 academic publishers’.

Working at Kortext

As the Publisher Services Manager at Kortext, Georgia’s role involves ‘maintaining positive collaborative partnerships with our publisher clients’. Day-to-day, this includes ensuring that accounts run smoothly and answering any queries.

Georgia leads the Publisher Services Team, encompassing several aspects of the business. First, the Special Pricing Unit where colleagues work with publishers to negotiate discounts on bulk orders and pricing for digital content supplied to international territories.

Second, the Kortext bibliographer who ‘sources alternative titles for books that aren’t available in digital formats and curates collections from our titles’. Georgia says, ‘if a publisher has a selection of titles that would work well in a collection, we’d be interested in collaborating with them’.

Finally, the Kortext Open Resources Collection (KORC) now comprising 17,000+ open access titles and open educational resources. She comments, ‘we’re always looking at growing KORC, and ensuring that we provide the highest quality, curated open eBooks for our customers’.

An evolving role

Georgia is particularly proud that ‘we’ve signed many new publisher agreements since May this year, which has resulted in thousands of new titles being added to the Kortext catalogue’.

She explains that her approach is rooted in collaboration: ‘I believe very strongly that partnership is the foundation of publisher relations and it’s not something that you can grow overnight,’ adding, ‘it’s been wonderful reconnecting with some of my former publisher clients now I’ve moved to Kortext’.

For Georgia, the goal is ‘to promote Kortext as a valuable and essential partner for all publishers, whether academic, trade, or specialist’. She’s also focused on ‘growing our content acquisition – including open access resources – to be the strongest on the market’.

Accessibility

Georgia observes that one of the greatest opportunities over the next few years will be around accessibility, particularly with the EU Accessibility Act coming into force in June 2025.

‘Kortext is already in a great position to offer accessible tools that comply with the new regulations – in fact, we’ve been doing this for years,’ she says.

‘It’s not a topic that’s ever going to stand still and we’re determined to always be at the forefront of accessibility,’ Georgia comments. ‘We’re exploring what we can do with technology to ensure that educational resources are as accessible and inclusive as possible for all students’.

She’s keen to stress that ‘our team will be on hand to help publishers with any questions they have about Kortext’s accessibility tools, and also whether their own content is compliant, to make sure that everybody is working together to reach these new goals’.

Open access

Georgia sees open access as another opportunity: ‘anything that makes people think about how they’re producing and funding their content can be a positive development’.

‘UKRI introduced changes in January this year, so many of the monographs supported by their funding bodies will have to be made open access within 12 months of publication,’ she explains. ‘That will have a huge impact on those who receive UKRI funding’.

Consequently, ‘we’re ensuring that we’ve got the sophisticated content ingestion workflows to accommodate that, and any titles which are shifting from commercial pricing to open access, to make certain that we and our customers are fully up to date,’ Georgia states.

Recommended reading

On a personal note, Georgia shares that she is currently reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which ‘is very appropriate for the digital content market!’

Find out more

If you’d like to meet Georgia in person, she’ll be part of the Kortext team attending the Frankfurt Book Fair from 16th to 20th October.

As a final note, she encourages all publishers to take a look at the new Kortext website, which details how we help publishing companies of all sizes.

To find out more about becoming a Kortext publisher partner, please contact the Publisher Services Team.