Dear IDPF members,

 I became active within the IDPF shortly before the OEBPS working group was formed, later serving as the group's Vice Chair. Throughout my involvement, I have been impressed by the intelligent, earnest contributions made by the organization's members. The other self-nominees, among many others, have invested extraordinary time and consideration to solving the problems our industry has to address in order to develop a successful eBook market, and I've learned a great deal from working with them.

 Entering the ongoing conversation at the point I did, I was surprised to see the extent to which members' experiences and points of view differed depending on what sector of the industry they came from, even when they shared the same larger goals. Publishers, retailers, distributors, service providers, and equipment manufacturers all want to get to the same place—and we all need to get to there together in order for eBooks to become (at least) as essential as print. What's hard is developing an integrated roadmap that takes into account everyone's specific challenges and limited visibility, building the pathways from the bottom up.

 As President and General Manager of Publishing Dimensions, I've had the pleasure of engaging on projects with many of the same organizations that constitute the IDPF's membership. The services that my company provides, based to a great extent around the custom implementation of high-volume content conversion programs, run the gamut across all the various sectors of the industry that I've mentioned above, so we see firsthand when systems don't mesh, or when one party takes actions that will complicate the activities of another party without necessarily having any way of recognizing the effect they are having. I think I've also been pretty successful at learning to speak everyone’s overlapping but distinct languages, through my work at Publishing Dimensions as well as from my diverse background in the industry before I joined the company.

 One of my key objectives as a board member therefore would be to help coordinate the various priorities of the IDPF's members—including expansion of OPS to other publishing sectors and to international markets, increased accessibility, increased interoperability, further development of OPS to standardize handling of rich content and more complex layouts, and investigation of solutions for managing metadata and rights information—and to help enable the various players and constituencies to engage in a vigorous, productive discussion, with contributions from all parties. From my past experience solving problems in partnership with publishers and others, I know that the best way to approach this task will be to invite and challenge everyone to step back from fully articulated positions and speak in concrete terms about the actual situations they face. We need to build on the momentum of OPS and OCF in order to make eBooks a winning proposition from all of our perspectives before we can expect them to realize their full potential in the marketplace.

 I appreciate your consideration and hope to be able to serve on the board on your behalf.

 Sincerely,

 Jonathan Hevenstone
President and General Manager
Publishing Dimensions, LLC