Candidate Statement - Liisa McCloy-Kelley

As the primary representative of Penguin Random House, I feel uniquely able to represent a wide swath of needs for our industry. Our organization is truly a global publishing company with products that touch nearly every genre in the book space. We have a very deliberate organizational objective to both stay on the cutting edge of advancing the stories we tell with pushing the boundaries of digital renditions and to do it in a way that helps not just PRH, but publishing overall. As a result of that philosophy, we have built the biggest eBook development team of any publisher I know and have one of the most advanced and deliberate EPUB3 specs out there. 
 
I personally have been involved with building eBooks and implementing standards for them since PRH published our first eBooks in 1998. Currently, I'm responsible for eBook Development and Innovation at PRH, which includes production for anything that is more than 1-color straight text. My team produced nearly 1400 titles over the last year, covering genres from Cooking and Lifestyle, to Kids picture books, to poetry, travel, education, manga, comics and graphic novels. Our philosophy for creating great digital books is to not mirror the print experience, but to take it apart and put it back together to take advantage of the features of digital reading. We have developed best practices for testing out new theories for interactivity and proving what works as we've encouraged the engineering groups at retailers to support more features in EPUB3. We have developed a new standard for fixed page kids EPUB3 that we are opening up to conversion partners and other publishers as a best practice for producing one file that will work for a variety of retailers while giving the best experience across the tablet/phone marketplace. 
 
I am very interested in continuing to represent these interests on the IDPF board and to help with coordination amongst the other publisher entities such as the AAP and BISG. 

Secondary menu