Sixteen months after stepping down as president and chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, Jane Friedman has formed a new company that will republish old titles by big-name authors including William Styron, Iris Murdoch and Pat Conroy in electronic form.

Together with Jeffrey Sharp, a film producer of features including “Boys Don’t Cry” and “You Can Count on Me,” Ms. Friedman, 64, has founded Open Road Integrated Media to focus almost exclusively on digital publishing. The company will also seek new authors willing to be published in the electronic format first.

Electronic “is going to be the center of the universe,” said Ms. Friedman, a flamboyant and relentless booster of authors during her four-decade career in New York publishing. “We really think that what we’re going to do is to help transform the industry, which is built on models that we all know are broken.”

When traditional publishers reissue print editions, they tend to do so with little fanfare. Ms. Friedman, by contrast, plans to push a torrent of online marketing on new readers in the hopes of reigniting the backlists of well-known authors in the digital world.