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NISO Forum: The E-Book Renaissance, Part II: Challenges and Opportunities

October 18-19, 2012
Boston, MA
Metro Meeting Center


About the Speakers

Speaker bios are in the process of being added... please see the Forum Agenda for the full list of confirmed speakers.

 

 

Ken Breen, Senior Director, E-Book Products, EBSCO Publishing

Panel discussion: Vendors & Platform Providers

Ken Breen joined EBSCO Publishing in 2010 as the Senior Director of e-book Products. He is responsible for developing and managing EBSCO Publishing’s e-book and audio book product and content strategy. Previously, Mr. Breen had been the Vice President of Business Development at Gale where he dealt with e-books and served in a variety of roles for 11 years including: strategic planning & alliances, rights acquisition & management, copyright & licensing and product management.

Mr. Breen’s experience with e-books began in 1997 as the Product Development Manager for City Directories at R.L. Polk & Company, an international, privately owned, consumer information company. In that role, he led the migration of Polk's infoTYME product (the electronic version of the print City Directory) from diskette to CD-Rom.

 

Ken Brooks, Senior Vice President, Global Production & Manufacturing Services, Cengage Learning

Running with the bulls: Publisher perspectives on managing eBook growth

Mr. Brooks is senior vice president, global production and manufacturing services at Cengage Learning where his responsibilities include the development, production, and manufacturing of textbooks and reference content in print and digital formats. Prior to his position at Cengage Learning, Ken was president and founder of Publishing Dimensions, a digital content services company focused in the eBook and digital strategy space. Over the course of his career, Ken has founded a Philippines-based text conversion company; a public domain publishing imprint; and a distribution-center based print-on-demand operation and has worked in trade, professional, higher education and K-12 publishing sectors. He has held several senior management positions in publishing, including vice president of digital content at Barnes & Noble, vice president of operations, production, and strategic planning at Bantam Doubleday Dell, and vice president of customer operations at Simon & Schuster. Prior to his entry into publishing, Ken was a senior manager in Andersen Consulting's logistics strategy practice.

 

Todd Carpenter, Executive Director, National Information Standards Organization

Welcome & Introductions

Todd Carpenter is currently Executive Director of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), a Baltimore-based non-profit that fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information used in research and learning. Working with NISO's broad constituency, Todd is working to improve the efficiency of the standards development process, extending the scope and participation of the community in standards creation and adoption, and enhancing the training and outreach programs NISO sponsors.

Prior to joining NISO, Todd had been Director of Business Development with BioOne, an online aggregator of scholarly journals in the biological sciences. Before joining BioOne, Todd was the Journals Marketing Manager at The Johns Hopkins University Press and participated in the development of Project Muse.

He has also held marketing management positions at the Energy Intelligence Group, a news service covering the oil and natural gas industries and The Haworth Press, a scholarly and professional publisher. Todd is a graduate of Syracuse University and holds a master degree in marketing from The Johns Hopkins University.

 

Alan Darnell, Director, Scholars Portal Services, Ontario Council of University Libraries

Managing E-Books for a Consortium

Alan Darnell is Director of Scholars Portal, a service of OCUL hosted at the University of Toronto Libraries. Darnell has worked as a Systems Librarian and IT Manager for the last 20 years, holding positions at the University of Alberta and Trent University. He holds Masters Degrees in Information Science and History from the University of Toronto.

 

Robert Darnton, Professor and Director of the Harvard University Library; Member, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Steering Committee

Digitize, Democratize: Libraries and the Future of Books

Robert Darnton was educated at Harvard University (A.B., 1960) and Oxford University (B.Phil., 1962; D. Phil., 1964), where he was a Rhodes scholar. After a brief stint as a reporter for The New York Times, he became a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard. He taught at Princeton from 1968 until 2007, when he became Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard. He has been a visiting professor or fellow at many universities and institutes for advanced study, and his outside activities include service as a trustee of the New York Public Library and the Oxford University Press (USA) and terms as president of the American Historical Association and the International Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Among his honors are a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award, election to the French Legion of Honor, and the National Humanities Medal conferred by President Obama in February 2012. He has written and edited many books, including The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (1979, an early attempt to develop the history of books as a field of study), The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984, probably his most popular work, which has been translated into 18 languages), Berlin Journal, 1989-1990, (1991, an account of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of East Germany), and The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France (1995, a study of the underground book trade). His latest books are The Case for Books (2009), The Devil in the Holy Water, or The Art of Slander in France from Louis XIV to Napoleon (2010), and Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (2010).

 

Terry Ehling, Associate Director, Publisher Relations and Content Development, Project MUSE

Panel discussion: Publisher and Content Provider Issues

Terry Ehling is Associate Director, Publisher Relations and Content Development, Project MUSE. Prior to her appointment at the Johns Hopkins University Press, she was the scholarly communications strategist at Cornell University Library, where she helped to set and implement an innovative, cost-effective publishing agenda for the university. She served as the Executive Director of Project Euclid from 2003–2008. She was responsible for the administration and overall management of the Project--a complex, collaborative, non-profit on-line journal publishing initiative for mathematics and statistics. Project Euclid is now a joint venture of Cornell University Library and Duke University Press. Before coming to Cornell, she was Director of the Digital Projects Lab (DPL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The DPL’s primary focus was on the design and cost-effective implementation of scholarly on-line communities, such as CogNet (2000) and ArchNet (2001). She was a member of the MIT’s OpenCourseWare management team during its pilot phase. 

 

Geoff Freed, Director of Technology Projects and Web Media Standards, The Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM)

Born Accessible: making e-books fully inclusive from day one

Geoff Freed, NCAM Director of Technology Projects and Web Media Standards, has been involved in broadcast-, Web- and multimedia-accessibility initiatives for more than 25 years. He has represented NCAM within working groups of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), the Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C/WAI), the DAISY Consortium and the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), and has participated in the Advanced Television Systems Committee’s (ASTC) Mobile Handheld working group to ensure that mobile content and devices meet the needs of users with disabilities. He is a co-author of the W3C’s Timed Text Markup Language (TTML), a non-proprietary method for providing captions and subtitles in digital media, and is a specialist in captioning technologies in all formats, from broadcast to Web. Geoff has led numerous federally funded R&D projects focused on hardware and software accessibility solutions, standards development and content preparation. He is expert in authoring and display technologies for electronic text and digital talking books, as well as solutions for accessible mobile media. He is an authority on Section 508 regulations and frequently consults on accessibility issues with a wide range of clients, from software and hardware manufacturers to museums, major publishers and universities.

Geoff is also the author of extensive training materials and guidelines related to Web- and multimedia-accessibility, and has trained hundreds of public broadcasters, higher-education institutions and service providers on how to create accessible digital materials of all kinds. He may be the only person you know who holds a B.A. from the University of Nebraska.

 

Larry Goldberg, Director, Media Access Group Director at WGBH and The Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM)

Born Accessible: making e-books fully inclusive from day one

Larry Goldberg is the founder and director of the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) at Boston's public broadcaster WGBH, where he started in caption operations in 1985. For more than a decade he directed WGBH's Caption Center and Descriptive Video Service (now known as the Media Access Group) and now focuses on research and development, public policy initiatives and strategic corporate and governmental partnerships.

Larry was instrumental in the development of the specifications for digital television closed captioning in the U.S. and recently co-chaired the FCC's Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee which was established as a result of the "21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act." NCAM is active with numerous standards groups, most recently focusing on the enhancement of web-based media for accessibility.

Larry received a BA in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Southern California.

 

Carol Helton, Executive Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Credo Reference

Panel discussion, Aggregators and Platform Providers

Carol Helton is an Executive Vice President at Credo with responsibilities for worldwide sales, marketing, product management and service delivery. Prior to joining Credo, Carol worked extensively in the information and software industries, including 7 years at Wolters Kluwer, where she led sales efforts in three of its four health business units, and ultimately served as Vice President of Sales, Clinical Solutions. She has also held executive level positions healthcare information technology at MEDecision and ZeOmega.

 

Skott Klebe, Manager, Special Initiatives and Information Security, Copyright Clearance Center

Rights, DRM, and Piracy

Skott Klebe, Manager of Special Initiatives at Copyright Clearance Center, has worked in copyright and licensing technology for more than fifteen years, leading the development of some of the largest licensing systems in the world. Skott was the architect of RightsLink, Copyright Clearance Center's point-of-content licensing system, and is the inventor on several patents in the fields of content and licensing. He speaks regularly at publishing industry events on topics including copyright, technology, and disruptive innovation.

 

Michael Levine-Clark, Associate Dean for Scholarly Communication and Collections Services, University of Denver

The NISO DDA Working Group: Toward Best Practices for Demand-Driven Acquisition of Monographs

Michael Levine-Clark is the Associate Dean for Scholarly Communications and Collections Services at the University of Denver’s Penrose Library. He has an MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois, and an MA in History from the University of Iowa. With colleagues from the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, he founded the open access journal Collaborative Librarianship, and serves as co-editor for scholarly articles. He has served as chair of the Collection Development and Evaluation Section (CODES) of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), has been a member or chair of many committees within RUSA and the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), and has served on a variety of national and international publisher and vendor library advisory boards. He is currently serving as the co-chair of a NISO working group to develop recommended practices for Demand Driven Acquisition of Monographs and as the co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, 4th edition. He writes and speaks regularly on strategies for improving academic library collection development practices, including the use of e-books in academic libraries and the development of demand-driven acquisition models.

 

Heather McCormack, Collection Development Manager, 3M Cloud Library

Panel discussion, Aggregators and Platform Providers

The newly minted collection development manager of the 3M Cloud Library, Heather McCormack has been navigating the worlds of librarianship and publishing since 1998. For nearly 14 years, she worked as an editor at Library Journal magazine, where as head of the Book Review she launched a regular review forum for ebook originals and fostered constructive communication between publishers and librarians about ebook access. She tweets regularly as @HuisceBeatha and has plans to launch a blog to market ebooks in the 3M Cloud Library.

 

Nick Montfort, Associate Professor of Digital Media, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Keynote: Electronic Literature's Units and Bindings

Nick Montfort writes computational and constrained poetry, develops computer games, and is a critic, theorist, and scholar of computational art and media. He is associate professor of digital media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is now serving as president of the Electronic Literature Organization. He earned a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Montfort's digital media writing projects include the interactive fiction system Curveship; the ppg256 series of 256-character poetry generators; the group blog Grand Text Auto; Ream, a 500-page poem written on one day; Mystery House Taken Over, a collaborative "occupation" of a classic game; Implementation, a novel on stickers written with Scott Rettberg; and several works of interactive fiction: Winchester's Nightmare, Ad Verbum, and Book and Volume.

Riddle & Bind (Spineless Books, 2010), which contains literary riddles and constrained poems, is Montfort's latest book. With Ian Bogost, he wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009), the first book in the Platform Studies series. He wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003), and, with William Gillespie, 2002: A Palindrome Story (Spineless Books, 2002), which the Oulipo acknowledged as the world's longest literary palindrome. He also edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (with N. Katherine Hayles, Stephanie Strickland, and Scott Rettberg, ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, MIT Press, 2003). He is currently organizing and co-writing 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, a 10-author single-voice book about a one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program.

 

Richard Nash, Vice President of Community and Content of Small Demons

Culture is the Algorithm

Richard Nash is VP of Community and Content of Small Demons. He ran the iconic indie Soft Skull Press for which work he was awarded the Association of American Publishers' Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. He left in 2009—the final book he edited was a Pulitzer Prize finalist—to found Cursor, now an open-source community publishing project and to run Red Lemonade as a pilot for the Cursor project. 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.

 

Brian O'Leary, Founder/Principal, Magellan Media Consultant Partners

Running with the bulls: Publisher perspectives on managing eBook growth

Brian O'Leary is founder and principal of Magellan Media Consulting, which works with publishers seeking support in content workflows, benchmarking and financial analysis. He also 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 was published in three parts by O'Reilly Media. The full book was recently released.

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 he became a consultant, 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.

 

Steve Paxhia, President, Beacon Hill Strategic Solutions

End Users Speak: Outcomes from Recent Surveys

Steve Paxhia's consulting practice is focused on the strategies and technologies employed by educational institutions and publishing and technology companies. Recently, Steve has served as the senior strategist for the licensed content initiative of the California State University's Digital Marketplace and is advising a number of businesses and universities on the best practices in digital publishing.

He has been involved in the e-book market for over 10 years since he served as Chairman of Rovia -- a start-up that developed secure fully featured e-books for the college market. Steve has considerable experience with custom publishing, licensing of intellectual property, electronic publishing workflow and technology, and EDI. During his 15 years in College Publishing, Steve developed significant experience in Marketing and Sales Management and was the founder of the publishing industry's Pubnet e-commerce and information system that has been deployed in thousands of bookstores across the United States.

Steve is the co-author of comprehensive studies covering Digital Magazines and Newspapers, e-Book Publishing Strategies, and Collaboration and Social Computing.

 

Sue Polanka, Head of Reference & Instruction, Wright State University Libraries

Panel discussion: Vendors & Platform Providers

Sue Polanka created the award-winning blog, No Shelf Required®, a blog about the issues surrounding e-books for librarians and publishers. The blog transformed into a book series with ALA Publishing in 2011 and 2012. Sue is the Head of Reference and Instruction at the Wright State University Libraries in Dayton, Ohio and the President of the Academic Library Association of Ohio. She was named a Library Journal Mover and Shaker in 2011, tagged as the Ebook Guru. Sue was elected to the ALA Council in 2012 and has served on Booklist’s Reference Books Bulletin Editorial Board for twelve years, serving as Chair from 2007 – 2010. Her column, E-Book Buzz, appears in ONLINE magazine. Sue speaks internationally on the topic of eBooks, including a series of presentations in Argentina and Malaysia by invitation of the U.S. Department of State.

 

Rebecca Seger, Director, Institutional Sales, Americas, Oxford University Press

Panel discussion: Vendors & Platform Providers

Rebecca Seger , the Institutional Sales Director for OUP, has been working with libraries for her entire career, currently leading the OUP team that works with and sells to all types of libraries and consortia in North and South America. Rebecca has been with OUP for 12 years, and Rebecca has focused on the product development, sales and marketing of ebooks, databases and journals to and for the academic and library community, and has been part of the product teams that have created such products as University Press Scholarship Online, Oxford Reference Online, and the new Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. She is the past chair of the Association of American Publishers/American Library Association Joint Committee and has spoken often on a wide range of library/publisher-related issues at industry gatherings, including the Charleston Conference, American Library Association, NFAIS, ER&L, and Association of American Publishers/PSP Division seminars.

 

Isabella Steel, Head of Digital Business Development, HarperCollins

Running with the bulls: Publisher perspectives on managing eBook growth

Isabella Steel is Head of Digital Business Development at HarperCollins Publishers in the UK. After completing the HarperCollins graduate scheme, Isabella joined the Digital team in 2008 just as ebooks came to the UK market. Her role was to launch the UK ebook business by managing both operations and client relationships. As the business grew, she worked to integrate ebooks with the print editorial and production processes whilst growing the key ebook retail accounts. In her current position, Isabella is responsible for refining the existing digital business and developing it through new partners, new business models and new products. Isabella graduated from University College, London with first-class honours.

 

Jenn Vail, Senior Marketing Manager, E Ink Corporation

The Future of eReaders

Jenn Vail is the Senior Marketing Manager at E Ink, in charge of Outbound marketing, including website, tradeshows, PR and social media. Vail has been at E Ink since 2000, in various roles, with hands-on participation at each stage of its explosive growth.. As part of the “founding generation” of the company, Vail was instrumental in setting up corporate and sales processes to take the company from an R&D to a global company. Vail worked as part of the core integration group during the merger with E Ink Holdings (formerly Prime View International) to align the sales processes and functional groups. Prior to E Ink, Vail worked in legal and retail management. Vail holds a B.S. in Communications.

 

Suzanne Ward, Head, Collection Management, Professor of Library Science, Purdue University Libraries

The Ideal E-Book World: An Academic Librarian’s Dream

Suzanne (Sue) Ward holds degrees from UCLA, the University of Michigan, and Memphis State University. She has worked at the Purdue University Libraries since 1987 in several different positions. Her current role is Head, Collection Management. Professional interests include patron-driven acquisitions (PDA) and print retention issues. Sue has published two books and over 25 articles on various aspects of librarianship. She recently co-edited a special issue of Collection Management that focuses on PDA, and her book Guide to Implementing and Managing Patron-Driven Acquisitions was just published by the American Library Association.

 

Ania Wieckowski, Managing Editor, Harvard Business Review Press

Running with the bulls: Publisher perspectives on managing eBook growth

Ania Wieckowski is Managing Editor at Harvard Business Review Press. She has had experience on both the editorial and production sides of publishing at the Press and at Charles River Media (now an imprint of Cengage Learning). She has played a part in a number of HBR Press's digital initiatives, such as the recent launch of a storefront to sell ebooks directly from HBR.org; the introduction of "HBR singles"--short, digital-only books; and the sale of digital books individually by chapter; as well as production-specific initiatives such as QA for ebooks and experimentation with CMSs. She also leads the Press's metadata efforts, and has edited and produced several enhanced ebooks. You can find her on Twitter at @agwieckowski.

 

Adam Witwer, Director, Publishing Technology, O'Reilly Media

Running with the bulls: Publisher perspectives on managing eBook growth

Adam Witwer has worked in publishing for twelve years, the last eight at O'Reilly Media. At O'Reilly, he created and ran the Publishing Services division, managing print, ebook/digital development, video production, and manufacturing. Along the way, Adam led O'Reilly through process and technical transitions to position the company for a digital-first world. In his current role as Director of Publishing Technology, he creates products that explore new ways to write, develop, manage, distribute, and present digital and print books. His team is currently beta testing a next-generation authoring platform.