Dear fellow IDPF members:

I would like to submit myself for election to the IDPF Board of Directors.

IDPF has done an excellent job bringing together a range of publishing interests to create a body of knowledge and standards that daily enable our industry to more effectively produce, sell and deliver content in a range of digital formats. By focusing on the value proposition of digital content and the logistical challenges to continually make it easier for publishers, the IDPF has provided an in valuable forum. The challenge for the industry and for the IDPF is build on the foundations built with OPS and OPF to continue to make the digital publishing industry more scalable, more useful and more profitable.

IDPF should continue to drive standards for digital publishing and delivery, expand those standards to encompass larger, more complex book types and markets, and continue to establish itself as a major force in international standards making.

My interest in a board position is driven by several factors.

As an associate at Ingram Digital Group (IDG) I deal with perhaps the broadest array of issues of digital publishing possible. Through our Lightning Source eBook platform, IDG delivers hundreds of thousands of eBooks each year in a wide range of formats and DRMs, Adobe Reader, Microsoft Reader, and eReader, through e-retail and publisher websites. IDG's MyiLibrary platform serves over 1,000 public, academic and research libraries across the globe delivering eBooks to patrons, researchers, faculty and students for over 300 publishers. And IDG's VitalSource Bookshelf delivers over 600,000 digital textbooks per year to students in North America and EMEA. The IDG companies have been delivering eBooks to the market since 1999. IDG is also working to streamline digital distribution workflow and marketing for publishers with its CoreSource Digital Asset Management Suite, Search and Discover platform and marketing services.

Ingram is fully committed to the integration of the digital and print worlds to maximize business opportunity for the 18,000+ publishers that use its services. Our belief is that we live in an either/and world where readers and students demand access to content in a variety of forms and formats and expect publishers to be able to deliver against those expectations seamlessly. Ingram is also committed to the IDPF and other publishing standards groups giving money, time and effort to promote a more efficient and effective set of rules and guidelines to help the publishing industry.

My personal background in digital publishing began in the newspaper industry as the editor of the first digital newspaper, The News and Observer (The NandO Times,) in 1994 and continued through to digital textbook delivery with VitalSource in 2001. Ingram Industries bought VitalSource in 2006 combined it with Ingram Digital Ventures and MyiLibrary to create the Ingram Digital Group this year.

Thank you for your consideration.

Frank Daniels III
Chief Operating Officer
Ingram Digital Group
and CEO, VitalSource Technologies