TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

IDPF, main e-book trade group, draws six more board candidates in December 12-19 election—and here are some technical priorities for the board and committees

By David Rothman

So who else is running for the board of the International Digital Publishing Forum, the main trade group in the e-book industry?

Nominations closed Tuesday. And beyond Garth Convoy, Peter Kent, Bill McCoy and Jon Noring, I’ll list six more candidates for the four vacancies on the nine-member board. At the end of this post, see a list of what I think should be tech-related priorities for the IPDF board and working committees—ranging from reliable interbook linking to an annotations standards. The e-book industry badly needs the latter, so that, for example, users of Adobe Digital Editions can see and share in-book comments from fans of other e-readers. OK, here’s the latest crop of candidates:

• Gurvinder Batra, chief technologist and president, publishing, of Aptara. Excerpt from nomination statement: “I really believe in the ideology of IDPF in their quest to produce a standard for e-Books and would love to contribute towards its creation same as I have worked with many individuals in publishing industry to demystify the structured world for everyone.”
• Frank Daniels III, chief operating officer, Ingram Digital Group, and CEO of VitalSource Technologies: “IDPF has done an excellent job bringing together a range of publishing interests…IDPF should continue to drive standards for digital publishing and delivery, expand those standards to encompass larger, more complex book types and markets, and continue to establish itself as a major force in international standards making.
• Jonathan Hevenstone, president and general manager of Publishing Dimensions: Wants among other things the “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…”
• Craig A. Miller, vice president and general manager of LibreDigital, a division of NewsStand, Inc.: “We are in a time of significant change and evolution in the publishing industry – a time that will ultimately define our digital future and create the long-sought path to success within the new digital paradigm. I seek a position on the IDPF Board to help the organization define and lead industry-wide acceptance of Internet digital warehouses, digital content and e-book standards that will benefit publishers of all types.”
• Steve Potash, founder and CEO of OverDrive and current board member and president of the IDPF: “Over the past four years I have been personally involved with bringing eBooks and digital book content to millions of new readers through thousands of public libraries and schools. I am working directly with numerous state library and school agencies providing digital book content to those with visual, print, and learning impairments. I firmly believe that the work of the IDPF can make a difference for those who face challenges from the printed book.“
• Ted Treanor, CEO of Rosetta Solutions: “Working closely with other standards efforts is increasingly important. We are obliged to reach out and listen to members to make sure that they are heard and their interests fairly represented. Encouraging sales and marketing innovation for digital products is also worthwhile. Continuing to hold educational events to share best practices and success stories helps grow the industry.”

“After the nomination period, the election for the Board of Director positions will be held by remote vote (email vote) beginning on Wednesday, December 12th and will end on Wednesday, December 19th at 2400 eastern,” says the IDPF’s new executive director, Michael Smith.

I really like the fact that Michael is Canadian. Ideally there’ll be board members in the future who come from outside the United States. E-books are an international industry, and the IDPF board should reflect this. I’m very pleased to report that 60 percent of the TeleBlog traffic is coming from outside the United States, with about 13 percent from France alone.

On the positive for the IDPF, it’s good to see that the current board candidates are committed to standards. I hope that more of them will join Jon Noring in making clear that the .epub standard should apply at the consumer level rather than just be used in an exchange format.

In terms of the future activities of the IDPF, here’s what I’d like to see:

• An annotations standard—either an original one or a standard from elsewhere.

• Reliable interbook and intrabook linking.
• Validation tools for creation and reading apps and easy and authoritative ways for people to determine if something is really in .epub.
• .epub logos for hardware and software packaging, documentation, and marketing materials. Couldn’t there be one first for nonDRMed books and then, when the IDPF has a DRM standard, one for nonencrypted and encrypted books alike? Separate colors for the different logos could help reduce consumer confusion. Actually this and some other items could be in the marketing category, too, not just the technical one, but everything here is really intertwined. Standards are meaningless unless they catch on—which means that the IDPF should more aggressively brand its standards than in the past, now that .epub is a reality, especially with the well-publicized adoption of it by Hachette. Let the .epub be as famous as “Intel Inside.”
• Studies of the potential of Social DRM and noDRM. How about actual experiments coordinated by the IDPF? One bookseller thinks that lack of the usual DRM could benefit small publishers although he still seems to see DRM as appropriate for bigger houses. I’m curious if the IDPF might be interested in investigating this nuanced approach.
• An alliance with librarians or Brewster Kahle’s OCA or another organization to assure that DRMed books in .epub can be accessible even if the publisher goes out of business. This way, people could register truly own the books for real. Such an alliance could be a powerful way to encourage people to trust the IDPF standards, even with DRM involved. I intensely dislike DRM, but I’m a realist and want modern classics to be available if the big publishers keep insisting on it.
• Efforts to make it possible for even small bookstores to have iPoddish features?
• The encouragement of development of basic open source creation tools for small publishers and public domain sites? Such tools wouldn’t include all the advanced wrinkles of systems from companies such as Adobe. The idea is to encourage use of the standard.

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