Garth Conboy of ETI, Frank Daniels III of Ingram, Bill McCoy of Adobe and Steve Potash of OverDrive won the latest IDPF elections. That’s four of the nine seats on the IDPF board. Steve is the current IDPF president.
Except for Frank, all are incumbents, which suggests that the IDPF will continue in its present direction, toward the further development of the .epub standard and plans to create standards for interoperable DRM.
I’d love for the IDPF’s pace to be much faster on these matters, but the organization still has made considerable progress—and kudos, meanwhile, to Adobe, ETI and others for working on an open source .epub validation tool.
Today’s official election announcement from IDPF Executive Director Michael Smith follows.
Dear IDPF Members,
Voting closed to fill the four open IDPF Board of Director seats at 2400 EST, Wednesday December 19th. Eligibility for voting required that the candidate be from an IDPF member in good standing.
A quorum was achieved for this election with 67% of eligible members casting their vote. The vote used the IDPF Remote Voting procedure via email. There were ten candidates for the four open positions. Each FOR vote received one point; the four candidates with the most points were elected.
Each of the following candidates was elected to the IDPF Board of Directors.
Garth Conboy, eBook Technologies, Inc.
Frank Daniels III, Ingram Digital Group
Bill McCoy, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Steve Potash, OverDrive, Inc.
Our next scheduled election for open Board of Directors positions will be October 2008. In the event of a resignation, we will schedule an election as may be required. Thank you and congratulations to all of the nominees in this election. Thank you to our voting members for your timely participation.
Best,
Michael
Executive Director
International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF)
Technorati Tags: Garth Conboy,ETI,Frank Daniels III,Ingram,Bill McCoy,Adobe,Steve Potash,OverDrive,IDPF,International Digital Publishing Forum
Open-source validation tool?
Well…Well…
What we need is an open-source creation tool.
And guess what… it will not come from either Adobe or the publishing industry.
I think an open-source reader and creation tool can become the de-facto standard once that reader gets onto devices.
The Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader are closed platforms but there is the Irex Iliad and the Hanlin which are not… so there is hope.
Hi, Tamas. When it comes to creation and reading tools, I see room for both approaches–commercial and open-source. Content creators will have varied needs, and not all of them will be solvable via open source. As for e-book-reading software, I don’t see any open source program coming close to Mobipocket in simplicity of use (as much as I love FBReader, it still has quite a way to go). That said, I’m thrilled to be trying out FBR on my borrowed iLiad. Happy holidays. David
Absolutely agree with Tamas. Give me a MS-Word or Open Office plug-in to create ePub and I’ll add it to my list of supported formats tomorrow. Admittedly this isn’t a solution for me–until there are lots of readers that ARE as good as Mobipocket, I’ll still have to support a half-dozen other formats, but I’d be happy to add ePub. What I don’t want to do is have to go through the manual process outlined in the tutorial that ran here a couple of months ago.
Since I do HTML, it seems that an ePub would be a fairly straightforward exercise. Come on, programming gurus.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
Thanks Rob,
please note that there’s little motivation at the moment to create an open source creation tool – in my opinion.
When Adobe’s Digital Edition really gets onto devices it will change, until then what’s the point?
Agree we have a chicken and egg. With few consumers installing readers (and few readers available), why create for this format. With few publishers creating in this format, why install the reader.
I think many publishers, and perhaps Fictionwise, which actively (at least with its multiformat books) promotes new formats, would be willing to add ePub to our list of formats (not happy because as I said, for now, ePub can’t be seen as a solution to the format babble but another format we need to add and support).
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com