Events: IDPF Voting: Board Nomination

Dear fellow IDPF members,

I submit my nomination for re-election to the IDPF Board of Directors.

This is an exciting time for the eBook industry — market and technology advances seem to be driving us forward with increasing speed. The IDPF should continue to be at the forefront of the effort to see electronic content delivery achieve the prominence that was optimistically envisioned at the time of the organizations founding.

Over the last three years the IDPF has recovered from its technical malaise and has embarked on new standards and research efforts: the IDPF ad-hoc content team gathered data and proposed problems to be solved in 2005; the Unified OEBPS Content Container working group completed OCF 1.0 (epub) and published the standard in October 2006; the Publication Structure working group developed OPS 2.0 and published the standard in September of 2007. These new standards are currently being widely adopted and evangelized — the expectation of reaching the "one format" goal in 2008 is not at all unreasonable.

I have a long history with the IDPF and it predecessor organization. In 1998, I led the team from SoftBook Press that worked with NuvoMedia and Microsoft engineers to draft the proposal that would become the starting point for the OEBF publication standards effort. I served in the roll of vice-chair of the Publication Structure Working group and was co-Editor of the OEBPS 1.2 standard. I chaired the OCF working group and co-chaired the recent OPS/OPF working group. I am actively involved in the education and promotion efforts around these two new standards.

I have played technical and executive roles in the eBook industry continuously over the past ten years — I am passionate about the promise that the technology holds. I would like to continue to lend my enthusiasm to this effort both technically and organizationally. On the technical front, I will drive standards evangelism and will likely be closely involved in future IDPF technical efforts. Organizationally, I would like to retain my seat on the IDPF Board of Directors and hereby self-nominate for an open seat on the board.

Bio
Garth Conboy is co-founder and President of eBook Technologies, Incorporated (ETI). The ETI team played significant roles in pioneering the eBook market, releasing the first commercial eBooks in 1998 and they continue to drive innovation in electronic book systems. ETI provides and licenses a leading end-to-end electronic book platform offering a full range of eBook products and services. The company possesses deep industry knowledge and the end-to-end technology components to support both enterprise and consumer eBook publishing: content acquisition, conversion, wholesaling, retailing, DRM, distribution, and reading.

Prior to co-founding ETI, Garth served as the General Manager and Vice President of Software Engineering for the Gemstar eBook Group. In these positions he was responsible for the operation of the division: platform and server engineering, quality assurance, content acquisition, content operations, content engineering, and customer support.

Garth is inventor or co-inventor of seven issued eBook-related patents; technologies include: cryptography and secure content distribution, eBook UI, resource/database dynamic conversion for cross-platform applications, and optimal paginated document presentation. Prior to its acquisition by Gemstar in 2000, Garth held the position of Vice President of Software Engineering at SoftBook Press leading the platform, content tools, and content engineering teams.

Prior to the eBook effort, Garth founded Pacer Software in 1980 and served as its CEO guiding it to a successful acquisition in 1995.

Sincerely,

Garth Conboy
President
eBook Technologies, Inc.