Events: IDPF Voting: Board Nomination

Dear IDPF Members,

I am pleased and privileged to respectfully submit my name for the open IDPF Board of Director position.

As an organization representing the interests of many stakeholders throughout the publishing value chain, the IDPF should feel very confident about its achievements in expanding the awareness and adoption of EPUB as a production, trading and workflow standard for e-books. The IDPF should also be commended for its efforts to fuel innovation in the e-book marketplace, which has consistently yielded reported amazing e-book sales growth opportunities and the continued development and commercialization of new electronic reader devices and business models that are radically changing the publishing business in many ways.

Innovation, change, diversity and growth represent a winning formula for our industry, which, despite growth in some segmentations, continues to face numerous challenges as result of the global economic environment. And while we continue to innovate, change and diversify our legacy methods for doing business to achieve growth and mitigate economic risk, despite the continued positive emergence of proprietary and non-proprietary e-book business models, we should also realize and appreciate how our publishing industry can still benefit from its adoption of consensus-based standards for the identification, cataloging discovery, trading and reporting of digital content.

As a member of the International ISBN Agency Board of Directors, the International ISTC Agency Board of Directors, the ISNI Founding Member Consortium, the BISG Identification and BISAC Committees, and an active participant in the development of new and emerging standards for the identification, cataloging, discovery and trading of content, authors, publishers and products, I believe that it is imperative that the IDPF and its member stakeholders make a concerted effort to work more collaboratively with the ISO Information Services standards community to ensure that adoption and utilization of EPUB is aligned with all of the stakeholder interests throughout the value chain.

Over the past two years, I have been fortunate to head up Bowker’s Identifier Services business unit, which includes the U.S. ISBN Agency and several other ISO-Standards registration agency operations. During my tenure, while I continue to appreciate the innovation and successes associated with digital content and e-book business models for which EPUB has played a key role, I have also been forced to reconcile and resolve numerous conflicts and disruption throughout the supply resulting from the abandonment of identification and meta-data standards for provisioning and exchanging critical bibliographic and rights management information as part of the adoption and use of EPUB. Admittedly, while supply chain standards such as ISBN and ONIX for Books that we, as a consensus-based industry have relied on for the purposes of business stability, are somewhat “imperfect” in their structure, application and use within select e-book business models and workflows, as the e-book industry continues to amorphously evolve as a whole, it will be critical as stakeholders with common interests to work together to unify and evolve these standards that have served our industry for decades. As a potential member of the IDPF Board of Directors, I believe I can fairly and positively contribute to these important initiatives.
 

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