Standards Pt. 1: Making standards in the 21st century

2:35 to 3:20 p.m.
Westend II

Standards have never been as important to the industry as they are today, but creating and maintaining the standards which oil the wheels remains challenging. In an informal round table, three leaders in the world of standards development for the publishing industry – Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive, Bill McCoy of the International DOI Foundation, and Mark Bide of EDItEUR – will discuss the challenges of the next few years as they see them, and explain how their organisations are trying to meet them.

The Speakers

Peter Brantley is the director of the BookServer Project at the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based not-for-profit library. He is the co-founder of the Open Book Alliance, an advocacy organisation working for an open and competitive marketplace in digital books. He was previously the director of the Digital Library Federation, a non-profit association of research and national libraries. He writes extensively on transformations in media and information access, with a particular emphasis on copyright reform for the digital age. With colleagues in the open software community, he has been coordinating the development and adoption of the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS).

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 e-books 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.

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.

Ronald Schild (MVB) joined MVB, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Börsenverein, the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, in 2006. One of the key projects during his tenure as CEO was the successful launch of libreka!, the e-book platform of the German book trade. Before joining MVB, Schild held various management positions in international media and IT companies. He holds degrees from the University of Saarbrücken (Germany), Institut Commercial de Nancy (France) and the University of Strathclyde (UK).