Dear IDPF members,

May I kindly ask you to support my nomination to the IDPF Board.

I am a German national and CEO of MVB, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Börsenverein, the German publishers and booksellers association. We are a private company offering marketing and publishing solutions for the book trade. Our services range from trade publications (ie Börsenblatt, the German equivalent of Publishers Weekly) to the Book Industry Standards Agency to internet applications (ie VLB, the directory of German books in print).

Our highest profile project is libreka!, a full text book platform. libreka! was launched at last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair and is now viewed as the main (and only) challenger of Google Book Search in the German language area. libreka! is a motion from within the book trade to allow users to search, preview and buy all books in print. Today we are fast approaching 100K books fully searchable online and will start offering e-content in the coming months.

libreka! is currently being reviewed by the publishing industries in other European countries which seek to implement similar solutions. Also libreka! will play a key role in building the European Digital Library, a project much favoured by the European Commission. It might be worthwhile pointing out that the European Commission is closely following the development of libreka! as one of the efforts to create online access to books.

EPUB will be of highest importance to us when it comes to selling content online. The format of choice in the publishing industry still is PDF which is also the current input format for libreka! As more and more reading devices are launched in the European market the limitations of PDF become clearly visible. My view – which I assume most of you will share – is that the quick adoption of EPUB by the publishing industry will in large part decide the success of e-books in the future.  

I would like to support the great work the IDPF has done so far in two ways:

1. Be a catalyst for the quick adoption of EPUB

My main role within MVB/libreka! is to establish consensus in the publishing industry for marketing and selling content electronically. This makes me very much of an evangelist for e-books in the German and European context. As such I consider myself as ideally positioned to make publishers agree on adopting and further developing EPUB. In that regard I would like to point out that we also run the Book Industry Standards Agency for parts of Europe thus further facilitating the introduction of EPUB.

2. Be instrumental in establishing EPUB as a worldwide standard

Publishing is a global business, the main players are truly international companies. However, discussions about EPUB have so far been more or less limited to the US. With my nomination I would like to offer my help in making EPUB a worldwide standard, accepted and used throughout all geographies. To that aim I would promote EPUB internationally on all levels ranging from the International ISBN Agency to the Board of Frankfurt Book Fair.

Please allow me to give you some background of myself. I have joined MVB two years ago after 10 years in the online media business. Before joining MVB I was running Amazon’s third party business in Germany. I hold graduate and postgraduate degrees in business administration from Saarland University (Germany), Institut Commerciale de Nancy (France) and Strathclyde University (UK). Under my management at MVB, libreka! has been built from scratch. I have re-positioned MVB as one of the leading European service companies for the publishing industry.

Thank you for considering my nomination for the Board.