2012 Speakers
Naif Al-Mutawa, The 99
Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa is the Founder AND CEO of Teshkeel Media Group, for whom he created THE 99, the first group of comic superheroes born of an Islamic archetype. THE 99 has received positive attention from the world’s media. Recently, Forbes named THE 99 as one of the top 20 trends sweeping the globe and most recently, President Barack Obama praised Dr. Naif and THE 99 as perhaps the most innovative of the thousands of new entrepreneurs viewed by his Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship. His direct contact with the horrors of people tortured because of their religious and political beliefs, led to his writing a timeless children’s tale that won a UNESCO prize for literature in the service of tolerance. He received the Eliot-Pearson Award for Excellence in Children’s Media from Tufts University, the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations “ Marketplace of Ideas” Award, The Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneurship Award presented at the 2009 World Economic Forum and has been named as one of WEF’s Young Global Leaders for 2011. Dr. Al-Mutawa is also the Founder of The Soor Center for Psychological Counseling and Assessment, Kuwait’s leading professional source of a broad range of psychological services. He has homes in Kuwait City and New York.
Sergey Anuriev, LitRes
Sergei Anuriev is CEO of LitRes.ru, a Russian firm specializing in distribution of licensed electronic and audio books in Russia and surrounding countries. LitRes partners with Russia’s largest publishing houses and best-selling authors, and offers its own electronic readers.
Beat Barblan, Bowker
Beat Barblan serves as Director of Identifier Services at Bowker. He is responsible for such identifier standards and asset management and discoverability solutions as ISBN, ISTC, ISNI and DOI. He is the acting head of the US and Australian ISBN Agencies, a director on each respective standard’s board and also on ISNI’s executive committee as treasurer. These solutions are renowned for their ability to standardize works across the book industry and content services supply chain, benefitting publishers, self publishers, authors, booksellers, aggregators, and other book industry professionals. Bowker is an affiliated business of ProQuest. Mr. Barblan joined Bowker in 2007 as Product Manager for the company’s Supply Chain business, overseeing new development and maintenance for Pubnet and PubEasy, the publishing industry’s premier electronic ordering tools. Immediately prior to joining Bowker, Mr. Barblan was Sr. Product Manager at Wolters Kluwer/Ovid in New York City, where he helped launch the OvidSP platform. Mr. Barblan’s previous career experience focused on foreign language education and translation, and marketing communication in the United States and Switzerland. He is fluent in English, Italian, Spanish, German and French.
Graham Bell, EDItEUR
Graham Bell is chief data architect for EDItEUR, the global metadata standards body for the book, e-book and serial supply chains. He leads EDItEUR’s standards development work,with primary responsibility for ONIX for Books, the widely-used metadata communication standard for the book trade. He previously worked as a senior IT manager for HarperCollins in the UK, where he was involved in numerous e-book, e-audio, POD and metadata initiatives.
Anne Bergman Tahon, Federation of European Publishers
Anne Bergman Tahon has been director of the FEP since 2004 and previously served as copyright advisor and deputy director. She is a member of ALAI (Belgian division), a board member of the European Internet Foundation and of the Europeana Network.
Ann Betts, Nielsen Book
Ann Betts is Commercial Director for Nielsen Book, part of The Nielsen Company. She is responsible for the commercial relationship with key clients in the UK and overseas including the major publishers, distributors, retailers, wholesalers and library suppliers, ensuring the trading relationships are maintained at the highest level. She is also responsible for the development of new business. Key business developments include the expansion of the fledgling e-book panel and further expansion of the LibScan panel — the latter collects UK public library borrowing statistics. Prior to her appointment to her current role in 2006, she was Business Director of Nielsen BookScan having joined in 1998 as Business Development Manager.
Mark Bide, EDItEUR
Mark Bide was appointed Executive Director of EDItEUR in January 2009; he remains a Director of Rightscom, the specialist media consultancy where he has worked since 2001. Mark has worked in and around the publishing industry for 40 years, having been a Director of the European subsidiaries of both CBS Publishing and John Wiley & Sons. He is a Visiting Professor of the University of the Arts London.
Baldur Bjarnason
Baldur Bjarnason is over-educated, over-read and over-opinionated. Some say that’s not a bad thing. He lives in Bristol (UK) and works in web development, research, design and marketing. Lately, he’s been returning to his PhD subject: eBooks and interactivity.
Timo Boezeman, A.W. Bruna
Timo Boezeman is an enthusiastic Digital Publisher for Arbeiderspers|A.W. Bruna Publishers, one of the largest commercial publishers in The Netherlands, and is responsible for all the digital titles (for all imprints) that exceed standard (text) e-books, like enhanced e-books and apps. He also has a part in exploring and implementing new business models for the publishing house.
Timo likes to pioneer with new ways of publishing (new forms, technologies and business models) and urges others to see these times in terms of chances and opportunities, instead of threads and fears. He is always on the lookout for new trends and possibilities (and not only within the book world) and loves to innovate with new digital concepts. You might call him a Publisher 2.0 or book hacker.
Oliver Brooks, ValoBox and CompletelyNovel
Oliver Brooks is the co-founder of ValoBox and CompletelyNovel. He is interested the evolution of the content industries from traditional retail through to social and distributed commerce.In 2008 he started CompletelyNovel – now the largest online book publishing community in the UK. It is designed to find the correct route to market for books. It enables anyone to publish economically while highlighting the books with a mainstream appeal to publishers. His latest project ValoBox is a pay-as-you-go e-book platform designed to create a new sales channel by integrating with the social web. Each book can be read on any device from any website and sold by any user using links or embeds.
Andrew Bud, MEF
Andrew has been the Chairman of MEF, the global community for mobile content and commerce since 2008. He helped found MEF in 2001 and was re-elected to its Global Board in 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2009. From 2005-2008 he was a non-executive director of PhonePayPlus, the agency of UK telecoms regulator Ofcom responsible for premium-rate telecoms services.
Andrew is the Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of mBlox Inc, the world’s largest mobile transaction network which handles enterprise SMS and mobile premium transactions for companies worldwide. Prior to becoming Executive Chairman, Andrew was the CEO of mBlox, which he co-founded in 1999 and led to profitability. From 1988 to 1996, Andrew was head of mobile technology for Olivetti in Italy, where he developed and launched Europe’s first wireless networks for PCs. In 1994, while at Olivetti, he became the founding technical head of Omnitel (now Vodafone Italia). Between 1996 and 1999 he was a Director at Connect Communications Group and at Azlan PLC, pan-European companies in the telecommunications products and services sector. His earlier background was in mobile technology R&D.
Andrew is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the IET, with a degree from the University of Cambridge. He delivered the 2009 Appleton Lecture for the IET on “New Approaches to Digital Distribution”, and in August 2009 was named by Telecoms.com as one of the top fifty mobile industry executives worldwide.
Michael Cairns, SharedBook
Michael Cairns joined SharedBook in October 2011. Prior, he established Information Media Partners in 2006 after he left RR Bowker where he served as President. Michael joined Bowker in June 1999 and was named President in December 2001. During his tenure he successfully migrated the company’s product mix from a reliance on print products to a dependence on web based products and services. Michael led all strategic planning activities and managed the launch of booksinprint.com, Ulrichsweb.com and globalbooksinprint.com – all previously print and or CDROM “franchise” products. The company successfully acquired a number of companies (Pubnet, Pubeasy, Syndetics, MIR) that further broadened the revenue base and expanded revenues derived from the internet and services. Michael served as Chairman of the International ISBN Executive Committee and was a board member of the Association of American Publishers. Prior to Bowker, Michael was a Principal Consultant in the Entertainment Media and Communications practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers and completed engagements at media companies such as Simon & Schuster, Thomson Learning (Cengage), Reed Elsevier, Ogilvy & Mather and Interpublic Group. He began his career on the corporate staff at Macmillan, Inc a $2billion publishing and information company after attending Georgetown University Business School.
Todd Carpenter, NISO
Todd Carpenter joined NISO as Managing Director in September 2006. In this role, Todd provides leadership to NISO as well as focuses on improving constituency relationships, standards development, and operational procedures. Prior to joining NISO, Todd was Director of Business Development with BioOne, where he served the goals of both libraries and publishers by enhancing products, services, and distribution. Previously, Todd directed the marketing of approximately 60 academic journals and was closely involved in the growth of Project MUSE at the Johns Hopkins University Press. He has also held marketing and business development positions at the Energy Intelligence Group, a news service covering the oil and natural gas industries, and the Haworth Press, an academic and professional publisher. Todd is a graduate of Syracuse University and earned a masters degree in marketing from The Johns Hopkins University.
Carlo Carrenho, PublishNews
Carlo Carrenho is a Brazilian publisher and journalist. In 2001, he founded PublishNews, a daily electronic newsletter in Portuguese that covers the Brazilian publishing market. Today, PublishNews has more than 11,000 subscribers and a weekly English edition called PublishNews Brazil. He’s also worked for several Brazilian publishing companies, including the publishing house Thomas Nelson Brasil, which he launched in 2007, and the POD printer Singular Digital, the digital arm of Ediouro Group. During the last few years, his attention definitively turned to the digital revolution that is taking place in publishing. Carlo majored in economics and later specialized in publishing at the Radcliffe Publishing Course in Boston.
Otis Chandler, Goodreads
Otis is the founder and CEO of Goodreads.com – a social network for book lovers. Launched in late 2006, the site has since grown to over 5 million members, completely by word of mouth. Goodreads raised an angel round in 2007, and is otherwise privately owned. Along with a passion for building websites, Otis is also a voracious reader. He started Goodreads as part of a personal goal to read more books, and has found a large core group of people that love reading, and have helped drive the direction of Goodreads. He is an engineer at heart, and loves tinkering and listening to customers in order to make the best product possible. Before founding Goodreads, Otis was a Software Engineer and Product Manager at Tickle.com. Monster Worldwide, the leading purveyor of online jobs, purchased the company in 2004. At Tickle, Otis was in charge of LoveHappens.com, a top ten online dating service. Otis credits all his knowledge of building successful online media websites to his experiences at Tickle.
William Chesser, VitalSource Technologies, an Ingram company
William Chesser is Vice President, VitalSource Technologies Inc., an Ingram Content Group Company. He has been with Ingram since July of 2006. Mr. Chesser was instrumental in the early design, development, and implementation of the VitalBook e-textbook platform. Prior to moving to VitalSource, Mr. Chesser was Assistant Director of Training for the National Paideia Center and K-12 teacher-training and instructional-development organization in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In that role, Mr. Chesser worked with a high-profile collection of educators from around the U.S. to develop classroom innovation strategies and techniques and to deliver them to school systems across the country.
Joshua Cohen, Ganxy
Joshua Cohen is a co-founder and Head of Business Development at New York-based Ganxy. Ganxy (ganxy.com/sell/ebooks) enables owners and creators of digital content, like music, video, and eBooks, to sell their media assets from anywhere on the web directly to their audiences. He is the former CEO and co-founder of Germany-based iPharro Media, a pioneer in video-based content identification solutions, and has also held positions at Merrill Lynch, Bertelsmann, and MTV. Joshua received his BA from Princeton University and his MBA from New York University, with additional studies at the University of Cologne in Germany.
John Costa, Qbend
John Costa is Chief Technology Officer of S4Carlisle Publishing Services and its wholly owned subsidiary Qbend LLC with US operations in Dubuque, IA headquartered in Chennai, India. With 22 years of digital print and media publishing experience John’s focus is customer solutions and innovation, helping publishers deliver a truly effective effective multi media educational experience to students and teachers. He challenge, staying ahead of the curve as Educational publishing quickly expands to include instructional redesign, XML first manuscripts, animation, audio, video, LMS , web based evaluation tools, analytics and database integration. John, a graduate of Drexel University in Philadelphia, has held leadership roles in process automation & redesign, solutions R&D, and business development with AGT, WorldColor, Quebecor, and Quad Graphics. A member of BISG, MPA, BIGNY, he participates in a variety of standards and research committees in XML, eBooks and content structure. He enjoys the opportunity to present and share his knowledge whenever possible.
Matthew Crockatt, And Other Stories
Matthew Crockatt, who heads up Sales and Marketing, was a bookseller for many years whose life was enhanced by discovering the kind of titles And Other Stories publishes and then selling them to his customers. He is a passionate reader who loves nothing more than sharing his enthusiasm with like-minded people. Having worked for Dillons, Waterstones, The Pan Bookshop, Daunt Books and then at his own shop Crockatt & Powell he has a wide knowledge of the book business. Also studies digital publishing and is known as @bookselector on Twitter.
Laura Dawson, Bowker
Laura Dawson is Product Manager for Identifiers at Bowker. She never shuts up about identifiers, metadata, and book discovery.
Horace Dediu, Asymco
Horace Dediu writes data-driven analyses on a wide range of mobile industry topics. He is the founder and author of Asymco, a blog for “curated market intelligence,” and previously worked for eight years at Nokia, as an industry analyst and business development manager.
His background also includes software development, IT management, and computer science research. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and an M.S. in engineering from Tufts University. He lives in Helsinki, Finland, with his family and a view of the Baltic Sea.
Adam DuVander, Programmable Web
Adam DuVander is Executive Editor of ProgrammableWeb, the leading resource for the web as a platform. He helps developers and decision makers navigate this new, connected web of APIs and SDKs and covers popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google Maps. He speaks about technology at numerous industry events, including SXSW and O’Reilly’s Web 2.0. DuVander is also the author of the technical how-to book Map Scripting 101. Previously he wrote for Wired.com.
Emad el-Akehel, El Kotob
Emad Eldeen is the co-founder and Managing Director of Elkotob.com Ltd; a technology company based in Egypt. Elkotob.com is focused on the creation of book-centric computer systems and the localisation, implementation and promotion of various book international standards in the MENA region. Emad Eldeen is also the CTO of The Book Depository Ltd, a UK based online bookseller with one of the largest catalogues in the world. Emad worked for over 16 years in developing IT systems with particular interest during the last 10 years in scalable distributed data structures, and self-managing e-commerce and supply chain systems.
Tarek Fadel has a deep understanding of the technical and business aspects of building enterprise software products, with over 17 years experience spanning product management, product marketing, consulting and business development. Tarek has spent the last eight years focused on solving critical business and technical issues associated with Intellectual Property Management. His firm is at the forefront of developing and deploying enterprise software for rights and royalty management and digital IP usage and tracking software for Publishing and Media and Entertainment firms.
Ian Forrester, BBC
Ian Forrester is a well known character and asset in any role he takes on. He lives in Manchester, UK where he works for the BBC’s R&D north lab. He focuses on open innovation and new disruptive opportunities via lively engagement and collaborations with startups, early adopters and hackers. A non-traditional background into interaction design which he has crossed over with development using XML & Semantic web technologies. He tends to live a few years in the future, and has a excellent eye for spotting the crossover opportunities of open technologies and business models. By watching what hackers and early adopters are doing to scratch their own itches now. Something he did successfully as the leader for BBC Backstage for 4 years. Previously a founder of the dataportability.org group, social geek events, including London Geekdinners, BarCampLondon, Hackday, Mashed, Edinburgh TV Un-Festival and Over the Air. Ian has a proven track record for making the unthinkable happen. He tends to work best with W3C technologies and Open Standards. A keen blogger he has kept up writing on his personal blog cubicgarden.com for 9+ years
Kevin Franco, Enthrill Media
Kevin is co-founder and President of Enthrill, a digital content provider and transmedia publisher based in Canada. Enthrill is a book-centric technology company focused on creating distribution and sales systems for traditional booksellers including bookstores, grocery and mass retail stores using e-book gift cards under the Enthrill Books banner. Kevin also owns Francomedia, an award winning boutique digital firm that has worked with some of the top consumer brands in the world.
Dan Franklin, Random House Group, UK
Dan Franklin is Digital Publisher at the Random House Group in the UK. As part of the central team he works with the five publishing divisions. His focus is on direct-to-digital publishing and exploring what the ‘book’ is, and can be, in the digital environment. He has been experimenting with short-form non-fiction and fiction with the Brain Shots and Storycuts series, worked on apps including MAGIC OF REALITY for iPad by Richard Dawkins, and played Svengali for the multiple award-winning digital marketing and storytelling platform,www.nightcircus.co.uk.
Lotte Garbers, author
Lotte Garbers is a Danish fiction-writer. From 2009 to 2012 she was chairman of the Danish Writers Association. In this role her main focus was the transformation of an industry in a period where books are doing well but the stakeholders within the industry are undergoing severe changes. She lives in France and has been a writer for 13 years, prior to which she worked for Microsoft Corp. She has a masters degree in international business and languages.
Ashleigh Gardner, Kobo Books
Bibliophile, Technophile, Francophile. Apple fangirl and ONIX enthusiast. I work at Kobo
Ami Greko
Ami Greko was most recently a manager of vendor relations for Kobo Books in the US. She is a founder of Book Camp NYC, an unconference for publishing types and readers, and co-curates and hosts the Ignite-style lecture series 7x20x21. A member of the PAMA and DBW advisory boards, Greko also presents regularly on digital marketing, including at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the LA Times Book Festival, and New York University. You can find her online on Twitter and on Tumblr as ami_with_an_i, and in real life probably in a bookstore in Brooklyn.
Lee Harris, Angry Robot/Osprey
Lee Harris is the editor with Angry Robot Books. A science fiction and fantasy publisher, based in the UK, but publishing worldwide, Angry Robot titles have won many awards, including the Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 2011. Lee also founded Hub Magazine – a monthly short fiction dead tree zine, which became a weekly online publication before half-collapsing at around issue 150. He loves mince pies, but hates dried fruit, and no, he doesn’t understand that, either. Find him at angryrobotbooks.com, leeaharris.com and twitter.com/leeaharris.
Michael Healy, Copyright Clearance Center (CCC)
Michael Healy is the executive director (author and publisher relations) at the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). Prior to joining CCC, Michael was executive director of The Book Rights Registry, and previously executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, a New York-based non-profit body dedicated to improving the efficiency of the book industry by providing standards, research, education and information. He has worked in the book industry for more than 25 years and has spent most of that time in senior editorial, sales and distribution roles in digital publishing. He has been closely involved in the development of standards for the international book trade, and is particularly associated with standards for metadata, product information and electronic commerce. Michael has led many international standards groups,was chairman of the International ISBN Agency, a director of the International DOI Foundation, and led the international ISO committee that developed ISBN-13.
Eric Hellman, Unglue.it
Unglue.it offers a win-win solution to readers, who want to read and share their favorite books conveniently, and rights holders, who want to be rewarded for their work. We run crowdfunding campaigns to raise money for specific, already-published books. When we reach goals set by the rights holders, we’ll pay them to unglue their work. They’ll issue an electronic edition with a Creative Commons license as specified during the campaign. These licenses will make the edition free and legal for everyone to read, copy, and share, worldwide. At Unglue.it, book lovers can pledge money to support these campaigns; add books to their wishlist to tell the world about their favorites; discuss their favorite books; share their Unglue.it pages via social media; and find direct links to public domain and unglued ebooks that they can read right away.
Jo Henry, Bowker
Bowker Market Research, the leading provider of market research information and business intelligence for the book industry, was formed in March 2012 by combining BML (Book Marketing Ltd), originally established in the UK in 1990, and Bowker’s PubTrack consumer business in the US. Bowker Market Research monitors the US and UK book markets through Books & Consumers, the premier resource for understanding consumer book buying behavior, as well as undertaking adhoc research for a wide range of clients. Jo Henry was previously the Managing Director of BML. She started in publishing at Victor Gollancz, becoming Sales Director in 1989 and, after Cassell’s purchase of Gollancz, the Group’s International Trade Sales Director. She left Cassell in 1993 to join the HEA’s Publishing Division as Head of Sales & Marketing, before joining BML in 1995. Following the acquisition of BML by Publishing News, she became Managing Director of the PN Group in 2007. Following the closure of Publishing News, BML was acquired by Bowker.
Adam Hyde, Sourcefabric
Adam Hyde is highly regarded as a pioneer and innovator in networked and collaborative book production. He has also been working in open source for over 15 years and is the project lead for Booktype.
Jason Illian, Bookshout
Jason Illian is the Founder and CEO of Bookshout!, a dynamic social e-book company which focuses on connecting people around books. Bookshout! allows people to read alone or together, engaging and interacting around content across multiple devices and platforms. With more than 12 years of technology and executive experience, Jason Illian is a visionary in the mobile and social new media space. Having raised over $35 million for new business ventures, Jason has a passion for taking great ideas and making them businesses. His strategic thinking has helped corporations, organizations, non-profits, churches, and leaders be more innovative. He is the former CEO of Big Jump Media (Godtube.com), a Christian video network that had over 4 million monthly users.
Robert Kasher, Iviago
A pioneer in the field of Digital Publishing, Bob Kasher was the founder of Database Directories – one of Canada’s first digital publishers in 1994, was an early driving force behind the development of mobile phone publishing through his development of MPS Mobile and Global Reader and has lectured extensively on the subject at industry forums throughout the world. Currently he is an Intellectual Property and Rights Consultant with First Source/Digi-Rights as well as a Business Development Consultant for Multi-media development and sales at AIC Publishing Services. He is now involved with the Book Industry Study Group’s (BISG) Rights and Permissions Controlled Vocabulary initiative and is a Rights Consultant working to develop Rights and Permissions automation software and services with Digi-Rights and First Source.
Justin Keenan, Plympton
Justin Keenan is a writer, designer, and editor. He graduated magna cum laude with highest honors in English from Harvard in 2010. While at Harvard, he served as managing editor at the Harvard Book Review and as designer editor for The Gamut. As an undergraduate, he twice received 1st Place in the Edgar Eager Memorial Prize for his short stories and also the Monthly Prize for fiction writing and the LeBaron Russell Briggs Prize for his senior thesis, a collection of short stories advised by Amy Hempel. His stories have appeared in the Harvard Advocate and his poetry has appeared in the Louisville Review. He is currently working on his first novel.
Jens Klingelhöfer, Bookwire.de
Jens Klingelhöfer is managing director and co-founder (2009) of the ebook distribution company Bookwire in Germany (www.bookwire.de ). Prior to creating to this platform, he was was managing director since 2004 of MFM Entertainment, a service to the music industry specialized in artist management and digital distribution. At the early days of his career, he was an art director for books, so that by creating Bookwire, he returned to his initial industry.
Miha Kovač, Mladinska knjiga
Miha Kovač is the former publisher and currently Head of Digital Development at Mladinska knjiga Group and professor of publishing studies at the Department of Information Science at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.In 2008, his first book in English Never Mind the Web. Here Comes the Book was published by Chandos in Oxford.
Jo Lal, HarperCollins, UK
Jo Lal is Director of Author Services at HarperCollins UK. Working with a team of people across the business Jo’s focus is to create a range of tools that will further enhance HarperCollins offering to its authors. She is currently looking at ways to best deliver information to authors in a more consistent way across the business. Jo is also looking for new opportunities to promote authors as speakers, as well as supporting them by offering author training workshops and other on-line initiatives. Prior to joining HarperCollins Jo was Deputy Managing Director and Marketing Director at Hay House Publishers.
Jakob Larsen, Schilling
Jakob Larsen works as a management and business consultant at the Danish consulting and IT company Schilling, that provides solutions to the publishing industry. Jakob has worked in the publishing industry for several years with strategy, management, supply chain and digital publishing in Danish media group Egmont before joining Schilling.
Allen Lau, Wattpad
Allen Lau is the co-founder and CEO of Wattpad, the world’s largest community of readers and writers. With years of experience building successful mobile tech companies, Allen first started prototyping a mobile eReading app in 2002 on an old grey-scale Java phone that could only display 5 lines of text. He wanted to solve a problem he was facing – how to read while on the go. So for the past 10 years Allen has been exploring the power of mobile/social collaboration, online communities, and user-generated content. Wattpad now serves over 9 million people a month and with over 5 million stories uploaded, Allen is leading a team that’s revolutionizing the way people share and discover stories on the web and across every mobile device.
Jennifer 8 Lee, Plympton
Currently, I’m working on a book on how I struggle with digital devices and overconnectivity for Simon & Schuster. That, and I’m a Good Person to Know at a startup called Upworthy, which focuses on spreading viral stuff that matters. (You can read a bit about Upworthy’s launch on Mashable, The New York Times and AllThingsD). Occasionally, you might hear my commentaries on NPR via Marketplace. I also think a lot about serialized fiction in the new world. We are launching a literary studio called Plympton. I am a founding trustee of Awesome Food, part of the Awesome Foundation, which gives microgrants to further awesomeness in the universe.
Anna Lewis, ValoBox
Anna Lewis co-founded the book technology company CompletelyNovel with Oli Brooks in 2008. Since then, they have created CompletelyNovel.com, a community powered book-publishing platform bringing modern publishing tools to an online network of readers, writers and publishers. Their latest venture is ValoBox, a fresh approach to eBooks which combines a pay-as-you-go reading platform with an exciting social retail model which will put customers at the heart of book selling. In 2010 Anna was a finalist for the UK Young Publishing Entrepreneur Award and over the past couple of years she has also managed the Author Blog Awards, the 24 Hour Book Project and a number of other collaborative projects.
George Lossius, Publishing Technology
George Lossius is the CEO of Publishing Technology PLC, whose products and services include advance, ingentaconnect, pub2web, VISTA, Heron and PCG and, through these, have some 400 diverse publisher customers. George has 25 years of experience in many sectors of publishing in the UK, USA and France, and he is also currently on the Board of Directors for the Book Industry Study Group. Prior to the formation of Publishing Technology, George was the Group Chief Executive of VISTA and held executive positions in France, the UK and the US.
Karina Luke
Karina Luke has worked in the publishing industry for 19 years: 5 years with Dorling Kindersley, followed by 12 years at Penguin UK where she was the Digital and Data Supply Chain Manager. She joined BIC as its new Executive Director in February this year. Previous roles have included international sales/rights, customer operations and stock management. She has a wealth of operational & data experience in both the physical supply chain and the digital supply chain and is passionate about metadata and process improvement.
Christophe Maire, txtr
Entrepreneur focusing on consumer product innovation in digital media and mobile internet. Christophe is founder and CEO of txtr, a leading eReading solutions provider with global ambitions. The company partners with publishers, 8 of the 10 global device makers, leading retailers and operators. txtr operates eBookstores in numerous countries (www.txtr.com), complimented by eReading apps and a cloud service. The company has been building the largest international eBook catalogue in the past few years. Christophe was the founder of gate5, a global leader in mobile navigation software, which he sold to Nokia in 2006. Today the unit which emerged from gate5, Nokia Maps, employs more than 1000 employees in Berlin. Christophe was also cofounder of Plazes.com, a company which pioneered “checking-in” (and was bought by Nokia in 2008). Christophe is further a co-founder of Phonedeck.com (phonebook app) and EyeEm.com (photo-sharing service). Earlier he built the largest digital film studio on the site of the East German film studio attracting Euro 40m investments from Vivendi, Bertelsmann etc. Christophe attended school in St.Gallen, ESADE and Stanford and worked in Asia for a few years. A Swiss citizen, Christophe lives in Berlin with his wife and 2 children. Christophe is very active in the Berlin tech scene and was involved in the early days of Brands4Friends, Plista, Barcoo, ReadMill, AppAware, Amen, and SoundCloud where he sits on the board of directors.
Amy Martin, Wattpad
Amy Martin is the Product Marketing Manager at Wattpad. Before joining Wattpad, Amy worked overseas as a digital consultant at a startup communications agency in the Middle Eastern country of Qatar. Early in her career, way before YouTube came around; Amy was part of a team exploring online collaborative video production with the Canadian Broadcasting Company. She was an intern at MSNBC.com and has consulted for various tech startups on communications and business planning. Amy holds a master’s degree in Media Ecology: Studies in Culture and Communication from New York University.
Paola Mazzucchi, AIE
She has worked in the publishing industry since 2000, with a particular focus on the role of technology and innovation. Since 2004 she has been involved in mEDRA DOI-related activities and in several European projects at AIE. Currently she is in charge of the overall coordination of the activities for the ARROW Plus project. ARROW is a tool to facilitate rights information management in any digitisation project involving text and image based works. Among others, she is also involved in the Linked Heritage project, focussing on the activities to facilitate the contribution of private sector metadata to Europeana and, on a national basis, in the LIA project (Libri Italiani Accessibili), a service to increase the number of e-books accessible for blind and visually impaired readers on the Italian market. In 2012 she’s been nominated chair of EDItEUR.
Claudia Mazzucco, Atlantyca
Claudia Mazzucco started her career in two advertising agencies and then became Head of the Direct Mail Division for the company Bottega Verde, a leader in sales of direct cosmetics by mail. Hired in 1994 as Direct Mail Manager of the book club by Edizioni Piemme, from 1995 to 2007, Ms. Mazzucco was the Managing Director of Edizioni Piemme which is the second largest publishing house in Italy after Mondadori, but ranks first on the list of publishing houses for children aged 4-13. Since 1 March 2007, she has been the CEO of Atlantyca Entertainment S.p.A., a company founded in September 2006 by Pietro Marietti, founder of Edizioni Piemme and rights holder of the famous Geronimo Stilton character (60 million copies sold to children worldwide), with the objective of exploiting the rights pertaining to the character not used by the Italian publisher Edizioni Piemme. In 2010, Atlantyca Entertainment CEO Claudia Mazzucco was recognized for her dedication to creating and implementing a stream of new ideas for the expansion of children’s literacy between China and Italy with the 2010 Manager Woman Award.
Heather McCormack, 3M
The new collection development manager of the 3M Cloud Library, Heather McCormack (@HuisceBeatha on Twitter) has been navigating the worlds of librarianship and book publishing since 1998. For nearly 14 years, she worked as an editor at Library Journal magazine, where as Book Review Editor she launched the first regular review forum for ebook originals, fostered constructive dialogue between librarians and publishers about ebook sales models, and lobbied for research on the relationship between consumers and patrons. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, and loves readers’ advisory, yoga, travel, and punk rock.
Bill McCoy, IDPF
Bill McCoy is executive director of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), the trade and standards group responsible for the EPUB standard interchange and delivery format for eBooks and other digital publications. Mr. McCoy was previously general manager, digital publishing at Adobe Systems. McCoy has been involved in publishing technology for over 20 years, and has contributed to the establishment of numerous industry-standard platforms including EPUB as well as PDF, OpenType, and PostScript.
Kat Meyer, Tools of Change, O’Reilly Media
Kat Meyer is a book publishing industry veteran whose background includes 20 years of editorial and marketing experience working for regional and national trade and academic publishers, including: HMH, Communication Skill Builders, the University of Arizona Press, Rio Nuevo Publishers, and many others.
Prior to joining O’Reilly, Kat acted as Chief Content Wrangler for her company, Next Chapter Communications, where she reveled in two of her favorite past times: all things bookish, and all things social media. Among her clients at NCC were: SourceBooks, NetGalley, AllRomanceE/OmniLit, Adaptive Blue, the University of Arizona Press, Poisoned Pen Press, BookSwim, and a little company called O’Reilly media!
Ken Michaels, Hachette
Ken Michaels joined Hachette Book Group as Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer in January 2009. In his role as COO, Ken runs all operational areas: Distribution, Facilities, Fulfillment, IT, Managing Editorial, Manufacturing & Production, Strategic Publishing Operations, as well as Distribution Sales and Fulfillment to other publishers (15 clients to date). Ken currently holds the position of Co-Chair of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG). Prior to HBG, Ken was Senior VP of Global Business Process Management for the McGraw-Hill Companies reporting to the Chairman; before that role he spent twelve years at General Electric in a variety of senior roles, including General Manager of GE’s Capital Mortgage Origination businesses.
Samantha Missingham, The Bookseller
Sam Missingham is co-founder of FutureBook, The Bookseller‘s digital publishing brand. She is responsible for audience development and marketing for all products in The Bookseller Group. She embraced social media and uses Twitter (Facebook, Linkedin & Google plus) to engage the global publishing industry. She can be found drinking wine at many publishing tweet-ups. Follow her @samatlounge.
Richard Mollet, Publishers Association
Richard Mollet became Chief Executive of the Publishers Association in October 2010. In this role he is responsible for leading political engagement with government and parliament at a national and EU level. He also regularly represents publishers in the broadcast and print media. Prior to this he was Director of Public Affairs at the BPI (the representative body of the UK recorded music industry) where he was closely involved in the Digital Economy Act, the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, and the wider debates around the value of copyright and the creative industries. Before joining the BPI Richard had ten years experience as a political communications consultant, working across a range of political and media sectors. He studied PPE at Worcester College, Oxford University. Richard is Chair of Book Industry Communication and Chair of the cross-industry Alliance for Intellectual Property.
Cristina Mussinelli, AIE
Cristina Mussinelli is the LIA project coordinator as she has been focused on the issue of accessibility in publishing since 2007 when she coordinated the Pro-Access Project, funded by the European Commission within the eLearning Program, participated by the Italian Publishers Association, the Federation of European Publishers and Dedicon. Since 1992, she has been involved in the digital and multimedia market. Since 1988 she has been responsible for the technological innovation and digital publishing areas within the Italian Publishers Association, the trade association representing more than the 90% of the Italian book publishing market, where she manages European and international projects, the digital publishing professional training course program, the Editech conference www.editech.info and the Permanent Observatory on Digital Content. Furthermore, since 2010 she has been a member of the Board of IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum), the global trade and standards association for electronic publishing, that develops and maintains the EPUB® standard.
Richard Nash, Small Demons
Richard Nash is VP of Community and Content of Small Demons and Publisher of Red Lemonade. For most of the past decade, he ran the iconic indie Soft Skull Press for which work he was awarded the Association of American Publishers’ Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. Books he edited and published landed on bestseller lists from the Boston Globe to the Singapore Straits-Times; on Best of the Year lists from The Guardian to the Toronto Globe & Mail to the Los Angeles Times; the last book he edited there, Lydia Millet’s Love in Infant Monkeys, was selected as a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Last year the Utne Reader named him one of Fifty Visionaries Changing Your World and Mashable.com picked him as the #1 Twitter User Changing the Shape of Publishing. He has spoken on the history and future of reading, writing, and publishing across the world, from Melbourne to Toronto to Helsinki to Seoul—Chris Anderson characterizes his Publishing 3.0 talk as “the best I have ever seen on the future of publishing.”
Ed Nawotka, Publishing Perspectives
Ed Nawotka is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, an online magazine for the international publishing industry that has been called “the BBC of the book world.” Prior to launching Publishing Perspectives, he worked as book columnist for Bloomberg News and daily news editor of Publishers Weekly. He has also served as the literary director of the Texas Book Festival, a judge for various book awards, and has worked as a foreign correspondent, a bookseller, literary magazine editor and advertising copywriter. As a journalist he has reported from more than 30 countries. He continues to be a widely published freelance writer, with his work regularly appearing in publications across the United States, as well as overseas. Ed’s reviews, essays and reporting have appeared in The New Yorker, The International Herald Tribune, The Guardian, Travel + Leisure, Los Angeles Times, Budget Travel, New Statesman, USA Today, and People, among others. He has appeared as a guest on various television and radio programs, including those on NPR, PRI, BBC, and C-SPAN, and has lectured at numerous universities and institutions. You can find him on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Jonathan Nowell, Nielsen Book
Jonathan Nowell is President of Nielsen Book, a subsidiary of The Nielsen Company. Nielsen Book operates globally and trades under the BookData, BookNet and BookScan product groups. Prior to his appointment to his current role in 2002, Jonathan was Group Managing Director of Whitaker, the UK based book information group and Publisher of The Bookseller. Jonathan is responsible for the P&L performance and strategic development of the Book information businesses of The Nielsen Company. He is a board member of Book Industry Communication (BIC) in the UK and Book Industry Study Group (BISG) in the US.
Brian O’Leary, Magellan Media
Brian O’Leary is founder and principal of Magellan Media, a consulting firm that works with publishers seeking support in content workflows, benchmarking and financial analysis. Brian writes extensively about issues affecting the publishing industry. With Hugh McGuire, he has edited “Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto”, a collection of forward-looking essays on publishing that is being published in three parts by O’Reilly Media. He is also the author of research reports on: the use of metadata in the book industry supply chain, territorial rights in the digital age and best practices in digital exports. Brian has studied the impact of free content and digital piracy on paid book sales and was the editor and primary contributor on a study of the use of XML in book publishing, two reports published by O’Reilly Media in 2009. Before founding Magellan Media, Brian served as senior VP and associate publisher with Hammond Inc., where he restructured editorial operations to benefit from the firm’s prior technology investments. Brian came to Hammond after a 12-year career overseeing production and distribution operations at several of Time Inc.’s weekly magazines, including Time, Entertainment Weekly and People. Brian joined Time Inc. after earning an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He also holds an A.B. in chemistry from Harvard College.
Laura Hazard Owen, GigaOM
Laura covers book publishing, paywalls and magazines for GigaOM, and has a particular interest in e-book pricing and e-singles. She was previously the editor of Publishing Trends, a website and newsletter for the book publishing industry, and served as a staff writer for paidContent. Laura writes from the GigaOM East office in Manhattan.
Emrah Ozpirincci, OUP Turkey
Emrah Ozpirincci was born in Diyarbakır, Turkey in 1954, and now lives in Istanbul. From 1977 to 1981, he worked for Pirinçlik NATO (U.S. Air Force) base in Turkey as Personnel Manager. He then spent three years at the US Consulate General Istanbul at commercial services and has been working for OUP since 1985, as Area Manager until 1994, and as Managing Director of Oxford University Press Turkey Branch since then. He also works as the Regional Sales and Marketing Director of Oxford University Press for the CAMENA region (Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa). He is Board Member of Turkish Publishers Association (TPA), Turkish Professional Association of Publishers (YAYBIR), Turkish Publishers Federation (YAYFED) and working as a consultant for the Turkish Ministry of Culture TEDA project.
Hermes Pique, Robot Media
Hermés is a software engineer and children’s book author. His company Robot Media empowers authors and publishers to create interactive picture books for tablets and mobiles. Through Robot Media he has overseen the production of hundreds of book apps, with more than 3 million combined downloads and 2 Publishing Innovation Awards. He is currently working on Storybuilder, the premier children’s book authoring tool (www.littlerobot.com).
Greg Pizzuti is the IBM Worldwide Sales Leader for Software Group in the Media & Entertainment Industry. Greg has been working in the Media & Entertainment industry for over 20 years, including over ten years with IBM. Greg is responsible for developing our software strategy within the Media industry and working closely with our clients to support their strategic initiatives. IBM Software Group has been acquiring companies at a rapid pace and Greg’s team positions these new solutions and benefits to our Media clients. Greg has worked in US, European, and Global job roles during his career, including a three year assignment in London.
Jesse Potash, Pubslush
Jesse Potash is the founder of PUBSLUSH Press (www.pubslush.com) – a social, full service publisher that lets readers decide what books get published, and for every book sold donates a book to a child in need. Jesse hails from a financial services background but has worked additionally across a wide array of industries including publishing, fashion, and advertising. Jesse also serves on the board of directors for the PUBSLUSH Foundation, which is committed to supporting children’s literacy initiatives worldwide. He is a native New Yorker, yogi, boxer, and avid traveler.
Asra Rasheed, RRKidz
CEO. Taking imagination and innovation to new levels combined with entrepreneurship has been a driving passion for Asra Rasheed throughout her career. As CEO of RRKidz, Asra’s vision is about making a meaningful and positive impact on today’s digital children through experiences they will grow to remember, love, and learn from. Asra brings over 16 years of entrepreneurial leadership and interactive experience to RRKidz. Previously Asra was Co-Founder and President of Thumb Media Group; content publishing platform for mobile and tablet devices. She was also Founder and President of NextRental, an online videogame rental service, later acquired by Gottaplay. Asra also served as Business Advisor for Peanut Labs Media (acquired by E-Rewards). She currently serves as Advisor for The Los Angeles Film School Game Production Degree Program, Yetizen (a game start-up accelerator), and is an Executive Board Member for Women in Games International (WIGI) where she continues to advocate and promote the inclusion and advancement of women in the global games industry. Asra holds a B.A. in Finance from California State University-Fullerton. When Asra’s not “geeking” out with her team, she loves to travel the world, explore different cultures, food, and music.
Joe Regal, ZolaBooks
Joe Regal has spent more than two decades in publishing, starting at the Russell & Volkening Literary Agency, where he worked with Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Anne Tyler, Eudora Welty, and Annie Dillard, as well as Nobel Prize-winner Nadine Gordimer. He founded his own agency, Regal Literary, in 2002; there he represented books as diverse as Big Fish, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Shantaram, The Master and Margarita, Scott Pilgrim,The Tao of Wu, and The Traveler. He co-founded Zola Books in 2011 as the first truly integrated social eBook retailer, creating an alternative ecosystem that empowers writers, publishers, independent booksellers, and curators. Zola is an open-platform retailer that makes eBooks from all major publishers available on all web-enabled devices, including the Nook, iPad, Kobo, and yes, most Kindles.
Daniel Rhatigan, Monotype Imaging
Daniel Rhatigan worked as a designer and typographer in Boston and New York for 15 years before coming to study at the University of Reading (UK) in 2006. After receiving his MA in Typeface Design, he came to work at Monotype Imaging to research and design non-Latin typeface families, concentrating on Indic scripts. He also lectures on typography and branding in the Netherlands and the UK.
Fabienne Riener, Sourcefabric
Fabienne Riener is the Berlin-based Development Manager at Sourcefabric, a not-for-profit organisation that builds open source software for newsrooms, radio stations and media organisations. Their latest tool, which will be launched during ToC, is an open social production platform for books. Before joining Sourcefabric in January 2012, Fabienne enjoyed a varied career in the media and arts sector including a two year stint at NBC Europe in Duesseldorf (Germany), running a Film Production company and setting up a Film Festival in Newcastle Upon Tyne (UK). She holds an MA in Cultural Management and won a Royal Television Society Award in 2008. Having studied and lived in Germany, UK and the US she enjoys being a blogging social media cultural hybrid and feeding her curious mind with news and information about new communication and interaction platforms. In her role at Sourcefabric she is constantly on the lookout for new collaborators, clients and partners. Follow her on Twitter, @SourceFabienne.
Charlie Redmayne, Pottermore
After brief careers as a cricketer and soldier, Mr. Redmayne moved into the entertainment and communications industry, starting at UK based breakfast TV business TV AM, before moving on to found his own businesses, RCL Communications and Blink TV. In 2000 he moved to one of the UK’s leading web publishing businesses, MyKindaPlace Ltd. Mykindaplace was sold to Sky in 2006 where he became Head of Commercial Partnerships before moving to HarperCollins publishers, where he was appointed the role of Chief Digital Officer responsible for building their global digital business. He left HarperCollins in November 2011 to lead the Pottermore team.
Sophie Rochester, The Literary Platform
Sophie Rochester is founder of The Literary Platform. She worked for five years at 4th Estate and Jonathan Cape (Random House) before moving to the digital agency GT London in 2000. In 2002, she joined Colman Getty working for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the Guardian Hay Festival. Since 2007 she has worked as an independent literary consultant and in 2010 founded The Literary Platform, a website dedicated to exploring new platforms for literature.
Chris Rogers, Penguin Group
Chris Rogers used to make ebooks for fun, and finds them no less interesting now that they are his job. He keeps a close eye on emerging ebook tech for Penguin Group. Current concerns include promoting accessibility and converging print and digital workflows.
Ronald Schild, MVB Marketing- und Verlagsservice des Buchhandels
Ronald Schild studied business administration in Germany, France and Great Britain. He began his career as a product manager in the consumer goods business in London. In 1997, he moved to Frankfurt to head the new e-business division of the German branch of Lexmark. This led to him taking over as Chairman of the Board of EMB AG, a firm of management consultants that specializes in e-business, and in 2005 becoming head of Amazon’s partners’ program Merchants@. Since 2006, Ronald Schild has been Managing Director of the MVB Marketing- und Verlagsservice des Buchhandels GmbH, which is an economic subsidiary of the Börsenverein.
Woody Sears, zuuka
Woody’s knowledge of the consumer and mobile technology industries has proven essential to the growth of the company’s digital publishing platform. After co-founding FrogDogMedia, the company’s iStoryTime digital publishing grew tremendously, leading to a merger with Germany-based zuuka GmbH, resulting in the world’s largest publisher of mobile children’s books. Under the name zuuka, the newly formed company utilizes the largely successful iStoryTime name as its flagship label and joint brand. Prior to zuuka, Woody Sears served as an experienced and entrepreneurial technology sales and marketing executive. He worked as a successful regional sales manager for Vettro Corp. where he was responsible for selling a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) based integrated suite of mobile enterprise applications to Global 2000 companies. Previously, Woody was a Global Account Manager and top performer with AT&T Mobility where he was responsible for consultative sales of wireless solutions to Fortune 500 companies. Woody earned an M.B.A. from Pepperdine University and a B.A. from the University of Colorado. Woody spends his weekends playing with his three kids on the playground, sand or snow… and changing diapers.
Alok Singhania, mobifusion
Alok Singhania is President of Mobifusion’s Apps Division. He is a serial entrepreneur in the field of mobile and Internet technologies and is passionate about developing exciting ideas into successful products and companies. As President of Apps for Mobifusion, Alok’s team is responsible for converting branded publisher content into entertaining and engaging mobile apps. In the past he has served as the CEO at Blindfish, a social networking based service for the online gaming, CEO at Info Objects, a network management software company, Co-Founder/EVP Marketing/Business Development at LiquidPrice (a reverse auction based Internet Comparison Shopping Service), and VP of Marketing/Business Development at Intellimatch (a pioneer in the field of Internet Job services). In addition, he has worked at Sun Microsystems Software product management, market development and engineering roles. Alok was a Ph.D candidate in physics at University of Pittsburgh where he also earned a dual Master’s degree in physics and computer science. He received a BS (Hons) from Presidency College, Kolkatta.
Mathijs Suidman, Centraal Boekhuis
Centraal Boekhuis (CB) is the main distributor for both physical and digital books in the Netherlands. Centraal Boekhuis enables Dutch publishers to deliver their ebooks through a wide range of ebook retailers – retailers which are supported by CB ebook distribution services (both download and cloud based) and retailers like Apple, Kobo, Nook and Google which run their own distribution services. As of October 2012, publishers can also set rental terms and prices for their ebook titles at CB, enabling retailers, but also libraries, to develop new business models based on (temporary) access pricing. Mathijs Suidman, is manager of product management and responsible for product development at CB. Among other duties he is responsible for CB’s digital strategy and digital distribution services for both publishers and retailers.
Michael Tamblyn, Kobo
Michael Tamblyn is EVP Content, Sales & Merchandising, for Kobo. he is responsible for sales, publisher and industry relations, content acquisition, and the merchandising experience across all of Kobo’s web and mobile services. He co-founded Canada’s first online bookstore Bookshelf.ca, which was purchased by Indigo Books & Music in 1998, where he served as vice
president of online operations. Most recently, Michael was the founding CEO of the supply chain agency BookNet Canada, where he launched the national sales reporting service BNC SalesData and authored the publishing technology call-to-arms, “Six Projects That Could Change Publishing for the Better.” Michael has a Masters in Business Administration from University of Western Ontario.
David Taylor, Ingram
David Taylor is Senior Vice President of Content Acquisition for Ingram Content Group and Group Managing Director of Lightning Source UK. Mr. Taylor has 25 years of experience in the UK and international book trades in a wide range of
senior management positions including online bookselling, retail bookselling and library supply for both books and journals. He is a former Director of Blackwell’s international library supply business. He served on the Booksellers’ Association
of the UK and Ireland’s Council for several years and is a former Chairman of the College and University Bookseller’s Group and the Internet Bookseller’s Group, the latter of which he founded. He is a regular speaker at book trade conferences and has published a number of articles on the impact that new technologies are having on the book trade supply chain. He is a member of the Society of Bookmen.
Valla Vakili, Small Demons
Valla Vakili is the CEO and co-founder of Small Demons. Prior to Small Demons, he held several positions at Yahoo!, most recently VP product with the Entertainment Group in Los Angeles. Valla is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and on leave from doctoral studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford.
Len Vlahos, BISG
Len Vlahos is the executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, a national not-for-profit trade association whose mission is to create a more informed, efficient, and empowered book industry. Prior to joining BISG, Len spent nearly 20 years at the American Booksellers Association, where has served as ABA’s communications director, e-commerce director, education director, and most recently, chief operating officer. Len has worked for Internet marketing pioneer Yoyodyne, and for Kratz & Co. public relations. Prior to joining ABA, he worked in independent, chain, and university bookstores.
Holger Volland, Frankfurt Book Fair
Holger Volland is head of the Frankfurt Academy and as vice president, is responsible for conferences and creative industries at the Frankfurt Book Fair. He was previously director of communications and marketing for the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers and Booksellers Association) and a member of the executive board of MetaDesign AG, where he was responsible for planning campaigns and corporate marketing and communication strategies.
Anna von Veh, Say Books
Anna von Veh is Co-Director and Co-Founder of Say Books, a digital publishing company in Auckland, New Zealand. (She is also a Project Manager & Consultant, Global Services, at Author-it Software Corporation, managing Cloud migrations.) She was previously the Editorial and Production Manager at Pearson, New Zealand. Anna’s primary interest at Say Books is the practical exploration of business, technology, and creativity as it pertains to publishing narrative fiction online (with ebooks as an output format). Anna is a fan of popular culture, and is particularly interested in fanfiction both as a transgressive concept that challenges us to think differently about many of the central tenets of Publishing, and as one possible community-driven, online model for mainstream Publishing.
Andreas Wiedmann, Metaio
After 20 years as CFO and Sales Manager in different German/Swiss Publishing houses (e.g. Scherz/Holtzbrinck, arsEdition/Bonnier, Paul Pietsch Verlage, CartoTravel/ADAC), he started working with digital companies in 2008. Since September 2011, he has been CFO at metaio GmbH (Munich/San Francisco) and co-founder of www.smart-digits.com – a German blog for digital publishing strategies.
Joe Wikert, O’Reilly Media
Joe Wikert is general manager & publisher at O’Reilly Media, Inc., where he manages the sales and editorial groups. He’s the author of the Publishing 2020 blog where he’s provided industry insights since 2005. Joe is also co-chair of O’Reilly’s Tools of Change (TOC) conference. Prior to joining O’Reilly Joe was Vice President and Executive Publisher at John Wiley & Sons, Inc., in their P/T division.
Kerry Wilkinson, author
Kerry Wilkinson is something of an accidental author. His debut, Locked In, was written as a challenge to himself but, after self-publishing, it became a UK number one bestseller within three months of release. His three initial Jessica Daniel books sold over 250,000 copies in under six months, making him Amazon’s UK No.1 author for the final quarter of 2011, its biggest-ever sales period. He then signed a six-book deal with Pan Macmillan and is one of Amazon’s top-10 bestselling authors of 2012.
Howard Willows, Nielsen
Howard Willows has worked in the book trade since 1987, in the areas of bibliographic aggregation and library supply, in both the UK and Australia, and has been closely involved with the development of industry standards during that time. He was primarily responsible for the initial release of the BIC Standard Subject Category scheme in 1996 and has been Chair of the Review Committee ever since. He has been involved in the development of ONIX from its inception, and has chaired the UK ONIX Group since 2002. Since the London Book Fair 2011, he has been exploring the possibility of a single subject classification scheme for the global book trade, liaising with key players from Europe, North America and beyond.
Kate Wilson, Nosy Crow
Kate Wilson started her publishing career in the UK after studying English at Oxford University by selling rights for Faber and Faber. She was Publisher and Managing Director of Macmillan Children’s Books from 1994 to 2004, and then she ran Scholastic in the UK between 2004 and 2009. After a (very!) brief period in adult publishing as CEO of Headline, part of the Hachette Group, she founded Nosy Crow, an independent publisher of children’s books and children’s apps, in February 2010. As a parent and a publisher, she is interested in literacy on the page and on screen and in how generations of digital natives may choose to consume text.
Amir Winer
Amir Winer serves as Head of Video Interactive Courseware at the Open University of Israel. He is responsible for migrating over 1,000 textbooks of the University’s academic press from print to interactive digital formats as part of the University’s Digital Textbooks Initiative. He is also responsible for producing academic video courseware and interactive learning objects. Currently, Amir is a special consultant for Israel’s ministry of education and is leading the design of Israel’s standard for developing k-12 e-textbooks. Prior to joining the Open University of Israel , Amir was Head of Research and Development at the Center for Futurism in Education at Ben Gurion University. Educated at Ben-Gurion University, Amir has an interdisciplinary educational background in instructional and media design, Psychology (MA) and Cognitive Science (BA).
Rüdiger Wischenbart, consultant
Rüdiger Wischenbart, born in 1956 in Graz, Austria, is the founder of “Content and Consulting” (since 2003), and a writer specialized in culture, cultural industries, the global book markets, innovation in the book industry, literature, media, and communication. Most recently, he researched and (co-) authored several reports on global publishing markets, notably “The Global Ebook Market” for O’Reilly Media and Tools of Change, the “Global Publishing Markets” survey for the International Publishers Association”, (IPA), and the “Global Ranking of the Publishing Industry”, updated annually since 2007 (initiated by Livres Hebdo, France, and co-published by The Bookseller, UK, buchreport, Germany, PublishNews Brazil, and Publishers Weekly, US), which is at the core of a debate of industry leaders at the Frankfurt CEO panel discussion, moderated by Wischenbart with the editors of the partnering trade magazines. Wischenbart co-authored the “Diversity Reports” 2010, 2009 and 2008 mapping translation markets and cultures across Europe. As a consultant, he regularly works for international platforms and institutions catering to the publishing industry, including BookExpo America, UNESCO and the European Commission. He holds a PhD in German literature from the University of Graz, is lecturing at the University of Vienna, Austria, since 1987, and served as Director of Communication to the Frankfurt Book Fair (1998 to 2001).
Marcus Woodburn, Ingram Content Group
Marcus Woodburn is Vice President of Digital Products for Ingram Content Group. Marcus is responsible for Ingram’s CoreSource family of digital products that serve publishers and retailers to ensure that e-books are available to as wide a market as possible. CoreSource is now the largest digital distribution system in the industry with over a thousand publishers and 170 retailers and other book vendors in its network. He spent 12 years working as an archaeologist and photographer in the Middle East and South America before he began his career in the information world by microfilming historical documents for UMI/ProQuest. He went on to hold several positions at ProQuest, including Product Manager for K-12 and Director of Publisher Relations. After ten year with ProQuest he moved to Ingram Digital in 2007 as Vice President of Publisher Relations, and in 2010 took on the role heading up digital content development. Marcus brings a broad knowledge of digital publishing, sales and distribution for journals, newspapers and eBooks. His experience working with customers that employ a variety of strategies in reaching the fast-evolving digital market provides him with a broad perspective of the industry. Marcus is a regular speaker at industry conferences and events.
Pilar Wyman, Wyman Indexing
Pilar Wyman is the President of the American Society for Indexing (ASI), the voice of excellence in indexing. A veteran freelance indexer with her own successful business, she is also an active member of the ASI Digital Trends Task Force, which was formed in 2011 to address the continuing and rapidly increasing evolution of book publishing from traditional print to eBook formats. The DTTF was a key player in the recent International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) inclusion of indexes in the EPUB standard, and continues to work with the IDPF Indexes Working Group. Within her own indexing and via the DTTF, Pilar and ASI are currently engaged with publishers, hardware manufacturers, and software developers to design and create smart indexes for the digital age.
