Agent Larry Kirshbaum has been named publisher of Amazon’s newly formed general-interest imprint. Kirshbaum will begin his new role on July 5th at the imprint’s New York City offices.

According to ereads.com, Kirshbaum’s imprint will publish business, general nonfiction, literary, commercial, and young-adult fiction in both print and digital formats. Earlier this year, Amazon announced the launch of its fourth and fifth imprints, Montlake Romance and Thomas & Mercer for mysteries and thrillers.

Kirshbaum served as the head of Time Warner Book Group until 2005 and more recently operated LKJ Literary Management. The Wall Street Journal had this quote from Kirshbaum: “I was trying to find a way to do some publishing as an agent, and I was talking to various people to learn how an agent could best be a publisher as well. In the end, I realized it was cleaner to do this working for a company totally committed to digital publishing and that has the resources and structure to make this successful.” (via Sarah Weinman)

Lagardere, parent company of Hachette Book Group (as well as Hachette’s UK arm comprising Hodder Headline, Orion and Little, Brown Book Group) reports its first quarter revenues and for the publishing arm, revenues rose by 29.2% to 411.2m euros (or ($554 million), largely due to the consolidation of 83m euros of sales from Time Warner Book Group. On a like-for-like basis, revenues to end March 2007 advanced by 3.0%. They report that the 2007 outlook for Lagardere Publishing is good, especially for Education in France and Spain and for Literature in the United States.