Candidate Statement - Bill Kasdorf

I would very much like to be considered as a candidate for the IDPF Board.

I have been an active member of the EPUB 3 WG since its inception, serving as lead for the Metadata Subgroup and taking an active part in both the more recent EPUB 3.0.1 and Indexing working groups. I also contributed (in collaboration with Dai Ichikawa of Time, Inc.) the Magazine Vocabulary for the AHL working group.

I have also been a very diligent promoter of EPUB 3 throughout the publishing industry:

•                Trade books and textbooks: I was asked to lead the recent AAP EPUB 3 Implementation Initiative, a difficult diplomatic task, coordinating work between the various work streams, leading the workshop attended by a variety of participants from the publishing ecosystem (publishers, RS and platform developers, aggregators, accessibility organizations, and others) to seek consensus on priorities for feature implementation and best practices, and authoring the resulting White Paper, which has been cited as one of the best concise summaries of the current situation with EPUB 3 implementation and use.

•                Magazines: I helped ensure good alignment between EPUB 3 and the IDEAlliance’s new PRISM Source Vocabulary (PSV) for magazines, serving on the working group that created the PSV specification and chairing its “Packaging PSV as EPUB” working group. I serve on the small task force that is working toward alignment of the IDEAlliance OpenEFT format for magazines with EPUB 3, ideally developing it as an EPUB Profile for Magazines.

•                Education: Based on my role advising both Pearson and CourseSmart on the development of their next-generation platforms based on the OWP and EPUB 3, I was asked to participate in and serve on the Program Committee for the recent EDUPUB workshop, which is intended to promote wide use of standards for educational content. This has led to the establishment of the EDUPUB WG at IDPF, working to develop an EPUB Profile for educational content, and also is facilitating collaboration between the publishing, educational, and accessibility communities.

•                Scholarly and STM publishing: I have actively promoted EPUB 3 in numerous workshops, annual meeting sessions, seminars, webinars, and articles for the Society for Scholarly Publishing, the Association of American University Presses, STM (the international association of STM publishers), NISO, and other organizations in the scholarly/STM space. I serve on the Publishing Business STM/Scholarly Advisory Board.

•                Writing and speaking: I have written many articles on EPUB 3 for a wide variety of publications, both in the US and the UK, and have spoken on EPUB 3 at IDPF’s Digital Book; O’Reilly TOC; Digital Book World; STM eProduction in London; the Frankfurt, London, and Paris Book Fairs; and many other events. I contributed the chapter on EPUB Packaging and Metadata for the EPUB 3 Best Practices book jointly published by the IDPF and O’Reilly.

•                Consulting: Much of my consulting work involves helping publishers and other organizations implement EPUB or develop EPUB 3-based specifications (e.g., Pearson Education and CourseSmart as mentioned above). In addition, I am a well known advocate for basing a publishing model on the Open Web Platform, aligned with the EPUB 3 specification; I have developed and implemented such models for a wide variety of publishers, such as Harvard Business Publishing, the University of Toronto Press, SAGE Publications, and the World Bank.

•                W3C: I serve as an Invited Expert on the W3C Digital Publishing Interest Group and am leading its Metadata Task Force.

•                BISG: I serve on the BISG Coordinating Council and chair the BISG Content Structure Committee, which publishes the popular EPUB 3 Grid (now moving, in collaboration with the IDPF, to a new generation Grid based on the IDPF’s Compliance Test Suite), as well as the Field Guide to Fixed Layout and other Field Guides in development on Fonts in Ebooks and Interactivity in Ebooks.

I have attached my bio [see below], which provides information about me and my work. But it is the EPUB advocacy listed above that I feel most qualifies me to serve on the IDPF Board.

In sum, I have served as an evangelist (promoting EPUB), an educator (helping people learn about EPUB and how to use it effectively), a diplomat (often serving as the link between IDPF and other organizations to ensure collaboration rather than competition), and a contributor (helping to develop and advance the standard).

I would love to be able to take my contributions to the next level by joining the IDPF Board.

Bill Kasdorf Short Bio

Bill Kasdorf, General Editor of The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing, is Vice President and principal consultant of Apex Content Solutions, a leading supplier of data conversion, editorial, production, and content enhancement services to publishers and other organizations worldwide. Active in many standards initiatives, Bill serves on the IDPF Working Group developing the EPUB 3 standard (he is coordinator of its Metadata Subgroup and was active in the Indexing Working Group); the W3C Digital Publishing Interest Group, which is working to advance the Open Web Platform to better address the full breadth of publishing needs; the IDEAlliance working group developing the nextPub PSV source format for magazines and other design- and feature-rich publications (chairing its Packaging PSV as EPUB Committee); he is Chair of the BISG Content Structure Committee; he is a member of the Publishing Business STM/Scholarly Advisory Board and the NISO eBook SIG; and he recently led an AAP initiative and workshop designed to align publisher practices and reading system implementations for EPUB 3. Past President of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) and recipient of SSP’s Distinguished Service Award and the IDEAlliance/DEER Luminaire Award, Bill has led seminars, written articles, and spoken widely for publishing industry organizations such as SSP, O’Reilly TOC, NISO, BISG, IDPF, DBW, AAP, AAUP, ALPSP, STM, Seybold Seminars, and the Library of Congress. Most recently, he is the author of the chapter on EPUB metadata and packaging for O’Reilly’s EPUB 3 Best Practices. In his consulting practice, Bill has served clients globally, including large international publishers such as Pearson, Cengage, Wolters Kluwer, and Sage; scholarly presses and societies such as Harvard, MIT, Toronto,  Taylor & Francis, Cambridge, ASME, and IEEE; aggregators such as CourseSmart and netLibrary; and global publishing organizations such as the World Bank, the British Library, and the European Union.

Secondary menu