I respectfully submit my name for the open IDPF Board of Director position.

Reasons for running for the position
As the Chief Operating Officer of Lexcycle (the company behind the popular ebook reading application Stanza), I am at the forefront of the business issues surrounding ebooks and represent significant real world experience with end users of EPUB. Currently, Over 3 million EPUB books have been read on Stanza as EPUB is the only format Stanza supports natively. I also bring perspective to the role having participated heavily in standards bodies outside of the publishing industry so I have seen what has been successful and what has failed. Finally, as a major driver for EPUB adoption (Lexcycle is constantly encouraging publishers to convert their catalogs to EPUB), I want to formalize many of the activities I already do with an election to the board of IDPF.

Fundamentally, I believe that proprietary formats that have been prevalent with ebooks to date have been a significant deterrent to success for ebooks. I strongly believe that a strong standards body driving not just the development of the standard but also the marketing and promotion of the standard is critical to the success of ebooks where maybe 2009 will be the year that the reality of ebooks will finally match the hype. I am running for the position not just as a representative for a technology provider but as an advocate for the user. Our company's success to date can be directly tied to a single-minded focus on the user and I want to bring that focus of the user to the IDPF.

Qualifications
I am an experienced general manager with nearly 20 years of experience in application development, strategy consulting, marketing, sales management, and technology management. I've been leveraging this experience at Lexcycle to help Stanza achieve significant adoption. I have built a career on the successful marriage of business strategy and technical execution and my role at Lexcycle is consistent with this history.

Prior to working for Lexcycle, I was the COO of SpringSource, the company behind the de-facto standard, open source Java middleware, the Spring Framework where I grew the company 5 fold in my 18 months there. I co-founded and served as President of SolarMetric, which was acquired by BEA Systems in 2005. I have also worked at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) Strategic Services and Exxon Research & Engineering. I am graduate of MIT (and was part of the highly publicized MIT Blackjack team), and hold graduate degrees from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and Stevens Institute of Technology.

General vision ideas for the IDPF
My vision for the IDPF is the exact same as the stated vision of the IDPF, in particular "successful adoption of these specifications" and "promoting industry-wide participation." As a possible board member, my goal for the IDPF is to increase its effectiveness in meeting this vision. In my opinion, the bottom line is that increased adoption of a consistent EPUB standard will have massive network effects, resulting in a virtuous cycle that benefits big and small publishers, distributors, book sellers, self publishers, authors, and most importantly, the readers. I've seen this virtuous cycle play out in other industries and believe it can be successful in electronic books. I believe the most important thing for the IDPF is not to expand the vision but rather focus on increasing the adoption of EPUB such that compliance is consistent and acceptance of the standard is universal.

Thank you for your consideration.

Regards,
Neelan Choksi
Chief Operating Officer
Lexcycle Inc.