IDPF Board candidate: Leslie Hulse, HarperCollins (INCUMBENT)

May 31, 2016
I'm delighted to have been able to serve on the Board of Directors of the IDPF during this exciting moment of transformation for digital publishing. The IDPF plays a crucial role in helping all players in our industry understand the challenges we face and the ways we can work together to advance our common goals.  This is particularly true now, as we consider the proposal of collaborating more closely with W3C.
 
I believe that I’m an asset to the Board for two reasons.
 
First, my Trade Publishing background.  It is important for the Board to have representation from across the industry, and I can provide a valuable point of view because I’ve been involved with many of the key issues of trade publishing digital business development for many years.  This enables me to consider EPUB development while taking into account the business issues of monetizing digital content in retail, library, school and subscription channels through vendors worldwide.
 
Second, I play a significant role in facilitating collaboration across the industry for the advancement of digital standards because of the positions I hold in industry trade groups.  I am currently serving as Co-Chair of the Digital Issues Working Group of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), a Member of the Board of Directors of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and a Member of the Board of Directors of the IDPF.  One example of my work is that I Co-Chaired the AAP’s EPUB3 Implementation Project which sought to speed adoption of the EPUB3 standard by developing a core set of features and functionality that all stakeholders can support.  The goal was to avoid the “chicken or egg” situation that was facing the industry and stalling adoption.  This project set up forums for all stakeholders – including advocates for people with disabilities, publishers, retailers, reading system providers and device manufacturers – to discuss the specification and determine baseline features that reading systems can support and best practices for the files that publishers provide.   The result of this work was delivery of a whitepaper that established a baseline that publishers and reading system providers could reference in determining their own plans for transitioning to EPUB3.  A second, very current example is the planned June 2016 session of the AAP Digital Issues Working Group where we’ll discuss the IDPF/W3C collaboration.  The goal of this session is to explain the proposal to all AAP member publishers and to then discuss issues and concerns that we can feed back in to the IDPF.
 
Thank you for considering my candidacy.

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