Events: IDPF Voting: Board Nomination

Dear IDPF Members,

We are now on the cusp of great change in the publishing industry. The long-predicted "break-out" of ebooks and related digital publications appears to be very close at hand. It is an exciting time, considering where we've been since the first ebook-bubble burst shortly after the dotcom collapse in 2000.

Some questions we need to ask: Is IDPF ready for this great growth? Can IDPF fairly represent the many stakeholder groups in the digital publication ecosystem? Will IDPF be an effective, representative trade organization that will help guide the industry in a balanced way for the benefit of all? Or will IDPF flounder in its mission and become irrelevant, or worse, become a front of some stakeholder group to the exclusion of the others?

I strongly believe IDPF can be an effective agent in helping the industry grow in the right direction. This direction is to serve the publishers and content creators while considering the interests of the consumers who fuel the industry. This can only be accomplished if IDPF continues to impartially recognize and balance, by its actions, the needs among its many and diverse stakeholder groups.

As a Director on the IDPF Board, I will work closely with the other eight Directors to achieve diversity, balance and impartiality in Board decisions, for both the trade and standards areas.

In addition, it is vitally important for the IDPF Board to take the long-term view in its decision-making, and not to make hasty decisions based upon short-term requests of a few members without first considering the longer-term implications and the good of all its members.

I also want to see IDPF become a true "digital publication" organization, and not just oriented towards trade books. Newspapers, periodicals, academic/education textbooks, and commercial/government documents (to name just a few) are publication types that are rapidly "going digital." It is vitally important that IDPF step up its efforts to collaborate with the other organizations representing those types of publications. IDPF must not go it alone, as it has done in the past, particularly in the standards area.

In fact, this expansion of scope by IDPF will, in the long run, benefit the trade books area, the original foundation upon which OeBF, the previous name of IDPF, was launched in 1999.

As the IDPF representative for DigitalPulp Publishing (an independent ebook publisher, promoter, distributor and retailer), I bring to the IDPF Board fourteen years of quite diverse experience in the ebook industry. I have the unique, holistic understanding of the vital role each stakeholder plays.

This includes the accessibility community, which for years I have given my unwavering public support, not only because it is right to do so, but because the goals of accessible digital publications are actually in full alignment with the long-term goals of the digital publication industry standards.

Space does not permit me to exhaustively list here all my diverse experience in the digital publication industry (refer to my ebook bio).

But note that I have been involved, on an independent basis, with IDPF, formerly OeBF, since the very beginning of the organization in 1999. I have served on the Publication Structure Working Group as an invited expert, including leadership roles as Chair of the Maintenance subgroup, and as acting Vice Chair of PSWG.

With this experience, I am in the unique position of being very familiar with IDPF, yet will bring into the IDPF Board a fresh, independent, forward-looking perspective that I believe, and that you may believe, is needed.

I ask for your vote. Should the IDPF membership elect me to serve on the Board as an at-large Director, it is my intent to personally contact each and every member, to get your perspective on the direction IDPF should take, both in the trade and standards areas. And my door will always be open since my role will be to serve and represent you on the IDPF Board.

Thank you for your consideration.

Jon Noring
VP of Development
DigitalPulp Publishing