Platform Books LLC's Fifth Anniversary

So, What is it?

Jan 06, 2026

Five years ago, my wife, Susan, and I launched Platform Books LLC to share books and writing and to develop websites. We started by devising a Virtual Attic and over time added two others with background and perspectives on projects as they evolved in print, online, and audio.

The concept emerged as I ended my association with PublicAffairs, the publishing company I founded in 1997, which is now an imprint of the Hachette Book Group. Susan was serving as chair of CIVIC — Center For Civilians in Conflict and advising NGOs, including BSF — the Barth Syndrome Foundation , supporting research and a community about a rare disease affecting boys.

The books we have published are for sale everywhere in bookstores if you ask for them to be ordered and directly from online book retailers. My Substack, Peter Osnos Public Affairs Press , is free to subscribers, with revenues from a paid option donated to CIVIC and BSF.

Our thinking was that over the past half century, the method of delivering information, personal letters, photographs and mementos, reporting, news, and commentary have been transformed completely by the internet. Preserving all these artifacts and finding the ways to add to them in new forms was the objective, rather than allowing them to disappear or be discarded.

Also changed were the financial models that made distributing information possible and sustainable for everyone in the chain. Print advertising, the mainstay of so many publications, was disappearing. To support media in all forms subscriptions and memberships have become essential. Substack is one of the major innovations and the most widely read pieces attract significant sums for the writers.

Our plan was to learn to use traditional and emerging technologies in our work across the evolving platforms. “Platform” was the name I adopted for the media columns I started writing at the Century Foundation in 2006, (before the term became so ubiquitous). What were known then as blogs became posts, memes, and content. To me they are still pieces, columns, and narratives.

Going forward, Platform Books LLC intends to continue operating in all the available formats. What exactly that means will depend on our whims, curiosity, energy and resources.

I am asked regularly if I am retired. I call this period of work life repositioning: using time to do the things Susan and I want to do rather than what we have to do. Both of us are amazed at the schedule we had for almost thirty years as we raised our family in Greenwich, Connecticut, an hour or more from our offices in midtown Manhattan by train or car. Weekdays began around 5 am and ended, usually, seventeen hours later in what was a relentless cycle of activity.

Familiar?

Those days are definitely over, replaced now by work-from-home and time spent observing our family’s successes and challenges.

Here are the addresses of our three websites and a list of the people who have supported Platform Books LLC for these five years and counting:

https://platformbooksllc.net

https://anespeciallygoodview.com

https://thegardenofmemory.com/

Editorial: Paul Golob

Web Design: Deena and Matthew Warner

Graphics: Maryellen Tseng and Alex Baker

Managing Editorial: Christine Marra

Publishing Partners: Rivertowns Books and Harvard Business Review Press

Book Distribution: Louisa Brody, Two Rivers Distribution