The open IDPF board seat: 13 candidates
Thirteen candidates, from companies ranging from McGraw-Hill and HarperCollins to Stanza’s developers, are competing for an open IDPF board seat. Voting will happen November 17-24, with results reported the 25th.
I see quite a collection of talent among the candidates. An interesting possibility would be Andrew Savikas, from O’Reilly. He wants the IDPF to lobby Google to “add ePub to the export options within Google Docs.” Fantastic idea! And if Google can join and help support the IDPF—short for the International Digital Publishing Forum—then so much the better. The IDPF is the e-book industry’s main trade group and developed ePub.
Stanza-related candidate keen on continued ePub focus
Yet another possibility would be Neeland Choksi, from Lexcycle, the developers of the DRMless Stanza iPhone app, an MIT grad who correctly thinks that ePub should be the IDPF’s main focus. Trust me, English majors. Trustworthy, comprehensive and widely used standards are a “must” if e-books are to be truly simple for nontechies.
Links to all candidates’ statements
Here are the candidates,with their statements linked, in the order the names appear on the IDPF site:
- Andy Weissberg (R.R. Bowker LLC)
- Ken Brooks (Cengage Learning)
- Gurvinder Batra (Aptara)
- Bob Kohn (RoyaltyShare, Inc.)
- Stephen W Smith (McGraw-Hill Professional)
- Scott Cook (codeMantra, LLC)
- James Macfarlane (Easypress Technologies)
- Ronald Schild (MVB Marketing)
- Andrew Savikas (O’Reilly Media)
- Robert Kasher (MPS Mobile)
- Neelan Choksi (Lexcycle Inc.)
- Leslie Hulse (HarperCollins Publishers)
- Russell Reeder (LibreDigital Inc.)
Good luck to all!
Disclosure: I’ll be a speaker at a forthcoming O’Reilly conference.
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