The IDPF‘s speaker’s list for its May 14 Conference in New York is here; the agenda, here.
As an e-book standards booster, I’m delighted to see Neil de Young (photo), the Hachette Book Group’s Digital Media Manager, participating in an .epub panel with ETI Prez Garth Conboy and Wiley Online Sales Director Peter Balis. Hachette uses .epub as its sole distribution format for e-books, saving a nice pile of cash and making it possible to handle more titles without eBabel to worry about at the production end.
Global markets will be another IPDF theme, and Mikio Amaya, from a Papyless Co Ltd,, Tokyo, is among the speakers, along with Dawn Bruno of the U.S. Commerce Department.
Missing so far: Google’s endorsement of .epub
Hello, Google? I see that your Roland Lange will talk up Google Book Search, but how about more than a sales pitch? The IDPF conference would be a great opportunity for you to announce—with a splash—your support of the .epub standard. Come on, G-folks. I’m rooting for you to do the right thing. Do you really want Amazon to set e-book standards? .Epub is a nice start but still has plenty of room for improvements in areas such as reliable interbook looking, a shared annotation standard, you name it. Google could provide the group with the resources it needs to do standards right—in an open way, so that no one could accuse Google or anyone else of, rigging the standards-making process.
