Digital Book 2013 Conference Speakers and Panelists

Paul Aiken, a 1985 graduate of Cornell Law School, has been the executive director of the Authors Guild since 1996. Paul testified before the White House Task Force on Copyright and the Internet, participated in the Conference on Fair Use, and has testified before congressional committees on fair use, competitiveness in a digital age, and the need for a small claims court for copyright infringement. His commentary on the publishing industry has been published in Publishing Research Quarterly and the New York Times.

Before graduating high school, Travis created a viral YouTube video on revolutionizing America's education through mobile learning. Today, he is a senior at Kennesaw State University (KSU) where he operates his growing non-profit organization, iSchool Initiative.

With the support of his team, Travis has presented in over 26 states & 3 continents allowing him to reach an audience of over 200,000 people. He has been featured on CNN, Huffington Post, and Forbes; in addition, he is the winner of the 2012 Google Young Minds competition and was invited to the White House for the Education Datapalooza Event. 

Travis is quickly becoming one of the top leaders in the emerging digital learning movement. Presentation available online.

Kent Anderson is the CEO/Publisher for the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery. He has been the Executive Director of Product Development for the New England Journal of Medicine, the Publishing Director for NEJM, and Director of Medical Journals at the American Academy of Pediatrics. He’s worked in healthcare publishing for more than 20 years, and has been a writer, editor, designer, copy editor, managing editor, and publisher. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Scholarly Kitchen, a recovering novelist, and has degrees in English and business.

# 1 NEW YORK TIMES and USA TODAY Bestselling author Jennifer lives in Martinsburg, West Virginia. All the rumors you’ve heard about her state aren’t true. When she’s not hard at work writing. she spends her time reading, working out, watching really bad zombie movies, pretending to write, and hanging out with her husband and her Jack Russel Loki.

Her dreams of becoming an author started in algebra class, where she spent most of her time writing short stories … which explains her dismal grades in math. Jennifer writes young adult paranormal, science fiction, fantasy, and contemporary romance. She is published with Spencer Hill Press, Entangled Teen and Brazen, Disney/Hyperion and Harlequin Teen.

She also writes adult and New Adult romance under the name J. Lynn.She is published by Entangled Brazen and HarperCollins.

Dr. Marc Aronson has worked as an award-winning editor, author and publisher of books for children and teenagers for over 25 years and now teaches in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University. This year he is giving keynote talks on Common Core in five states.

Paul Belfanti is Director of Content Architecture for Pearson Education North America. Paul has worked in educational publishing for almost 20 years in a variety of creative, production, and technology roles, and has been developing and supporting XML workflows since 2000. In 2009 he established the first ever team within Pearson fully focused on standards and best practices. Paul’s team has led development of standards around content structure (XML), metadata/taxonomy, rich media and image file formats, accessibility and assessment, among others, to lay the foundation for Pearson’s transformation to a unified global, digital and impact-driven learning services company.

Paul has a B.F.A in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and pursued a fine arts career before entering the publishing industry. He remains connected to this passion as chairman of the board of trustees of City Without Walls, an artist support and arts education non-profit based in Newark, NJ.

Micah Bowers founded Bluefire Productions in 2001 and serves as the UX director. Micah leads the Bluefire project teams and collaborates with clients on content, strategy and experience design.

Micah first became obsessed with interactive media in the late 80’s while at the Evergreen State College. There he worked on interactive video projects (through grants from DSHS) that utilized Hypercard, an early genlock board prototype, and a video disk player.

In 1996 Micah joined Vance Martin and Roland Yamamoto to start up LiveWire Interactive, Inc. There he led the production teams on a wide variety of CD-ROM, iTV and online projects for clients such as Microsoft, Sony, Shell, HP, Fujitsu, etc. In 2000 LiveWire took some venture money, merged with a few other companies in the space, and became Wirestone - which is still going strong today.

Micah left Wirestone in 2001 to start anew with Bluefire doing the things he loves best; hands-on involvment in the creation of great interactive experiences that engage users and deliver solid business results.

Mr. Brooks is senior vice president, global production and manufacturing services at Cengage Learning where his responsibilities include the development, production, and manufacturing of textbooks and reference content in print and digital formats. Prior to his position at Cengage Learning, Ken was president and founder of Publishing Dimensions, a digital content services company focused in the eBook and digital strategy space. Over the course of his career, Ken has founded a Philippines-based text conversion company; a public domain publishing imprint; and a distribution-center based print-on-demand operation and has worked in trade, professional, higher education and K-12 publishing sectors. He has held several senior management positions in publishing at Barnes & Noble, Bantam Doubleday Dell, and Simon & Schuster.

Elizabeth Castro has been helping people create and publish their own work in print, web, and ereaders since 1987. She is the author of EPUB Straight to the Point: Creating ebooks for the Apple iPad and other ereaders and From InDesign CS 5.5 to EPUB and Kindle, among many other computer books and is the host of the popular blog, Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis. She divides her time and her heart between Catalonia, the US, and Twitter (lizcastro). Presentation w/ audio available on slideshare.

Otis is the co-founder and CEO of Goodreads.com (recently acquired by Amazon.com). Launched in 2007, the site has since grown to 17 million registered members who have added more than 530 million books and written more than 23 million reviews. Goodreads is a subsidiary of (AMZN) Amazon.com, Inc. 

Along with a passion for creating websites, Otis is also a voracious reader. He started Goodreads as part of a personal goal to read more books, and has found a large group of people who love reading and have helped drive the direction of Goodreads. He is an engineer at heart, and loves tinkering and listening to customers in order to make the best product possible.

Before founding Goodreads, Otis was a Lead Software Engineer and Product Manager at Tickle.com. Monster Worldwide, the leading purveyor of online jobs, purchased the company in 2004 for $100 million. At Tickle, Otis was in charge of LoveHappens.com, a top ten online dating service. Otis credits all his knowledge of building successful online media websites to his experiences at Tickle. Otis graduated with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, where he always believed he would one day build cars.

Samantha Cohen is the director of the Digital Content Development department at Simon & Schuster, where she has been working on all aspects of digital publishing for six years. Under Sam's direction, her group develops ebooks for all of S&S's adult and children's imprints with emphasis on quality and innovation. 

Sylvia Day is the #1 New York Times and #1 international bestselling author of more than a dozen award-winning novels sold in thirty-nine countries. A reader favorite across several genres, there are millions of copies of her books in print worldwide. She has been nominated for the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Author and her work has been honored as Amazon's Best of the Year in Romance. She has won the RT Book Reviews Reviewers' Choice Award and been nominated for Romance Writers of America's prestigious RITA award twice. Visit her at sylviaday.com.

Daniel Fountenberry is an experienced producer of television news and non-fiction entertainment and the founder of Borne Digital, a New York based start-up that has developed an award winning, adaptive reading platform for children. He previously served as the Chief of Staff of ABC News, devised business and editorial strategy for Reuters Insider, a 24/7, web video news service, and developed programming for History Channel International. He began his career in media as an on-air reporter and news producer in San Francisco. Before working in television, he taught Language Arts and Social Studies to 7th and 8th grade students and was a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar to France. He is a graduate of Columbia Business School and UC Berkeley. 

A 30-year Ingram veteran, Mr. Freeman is well known in the industry for his supply chain and e-textbook and e-book expertise. Kent has served as Senior Vice President of Business Development, and Chief Technology Officer, for Ingram Book Group and Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer for Ingram Digital, in addition to his current role of Chief Operating Officer, Vital Source Technologies. As a thought leader, Kent has been requested to speak at numerous global industry events. Past events Kent has spoken at include Book Expo America (BEA), the American Library Association (ALA), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) events, London Book Fair, Frankfurt Book Fair and the London Booksellers Association. Mr. Freeman has served as the Chair of the Book Industry Study Group, a non-profit organization that provides research and standards development for the book industry and as Chair of the Book Industry Systems Advisory Committee.

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer with The New Yorker and was formerly a business and science reporter at the Washington Post. He is the #1 bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers and his new book David and Goliath will be published in October. He lives in New York City.

Jeremy Greenfield is editorial director of Digital Book World, the leading source of news, analysis and information about the growing ebook and digital publishing industry. He is responsible for managing all editorial content on DigitalBookWorld.com, including the DBW Expert Publishing Blog, the Digital Book Wire, the DBW Daily, the DBW Ebook Best-Seller List and editorial social media communications. Prior to joining Digital Book World in October 2011, Jeremy spent three years as a careers editor at FINS.com, a Dow Jones/The Wall Street Journal site that he helped launch. Jeremy has spent time as a journalist covering magazines, media, marketing, advertising, culture, careers, finance, technology, the economy and, now, digital books.

Markus Gylling is the CTO of the IDPF and the DAISY Consortium. Through his work with DAISY he has during the past decade been engaged in the development of specifications, tools and educational efforts for the realization of inclusive publishing on a global scale. Markus is the chair of the EPUB 3 Working Group, and during 2010 and 2011 he lead the development of the EPUB 3 specification. Markus lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.

Masaaki Hagino is the co-founder of Voyager Japan with Bob Stein, Voyager US. Prior to that, Hagino was Executive Director of Pioneer LaserDisc in Japan and had developed countless number of interactive programs for LaserDisc, including back-then ground breaking interactive system using HyperCard with Apple. Originally, he was a documentary film director for one of the Japanese major film studios, Toei.

Voyager was established in 1992 in Tokyo as a joint venture company with Voyager US. Since then, the company has been specializing only in digital publishing for 19 years. Voyager's eBook format for Japanese has been used by most of the major and small to mid-size publishing companies in Japan including Kodansha, Shinchosha, Kadokawa, Gentosha, Chukuma, to name a few. Voyager's mobile comic viewer co-developed and owned with Celsys, BS Reader has become the official application for all the three mobile phone carriers in Japan and now used by more than 90% of all the mobile phone users in Japan. Since May 2010, Voyager has been a member of IDPF.

Eve Hill is a nationally known expert on disability rights law. Ms. Hill is Senior Counselor to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, where she is responsible for oversight of the Division’s disability rights enforcement. Ms. Hill was previously Of Counsel with the law firm of Brown Goldstein & Levy, where she participated in the firm’s disability rights practice. Prior to joining Brown Goldstein & Levy, Ms. Hill was Senior Vice President of the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University (in the Washington, DC office), where she was responsible for the Institute’s disability civil rights work.

Previously, Ms. Hill was the founding Director of the Washington DC Office of Disability Rights, a Cabinet-level DC government agency dedicated to improving access for people with disabilities to government programs. Prior to joining the District, Ms. Hill was Executive Director of the Disability Rights Legal Center in Los Angeles. She was also a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at Loyola Law School.

Ms. Hill is the co-author of a treatise and a casebook on “Disability Civil Rights Law and Policy”.

After eight years working as a yacht captain delivering boats from Chicago to Barbados and everywhere in between, Hugh Howey was finally lured away from the sea by the girl of his dreams. Sequestered in the mountains of North Carolina, he directed his energies into a childhood fantasy of writing soaring adventure stories. His first series, The Molly Fyde Saga, won endorsements and awards from bestselling authors and bloggers. But it was his publication of Wool and the four stories that followed that gave him the freedom to quit his day job and write full-time. He now lives in Jupiter, Florida with his wife Amber and their dog Bella, just close enough to the sea for it to call to him yet again.

Clynton Hunt is VP of Business Development at ZOO Digital. After years of experience in children’s digital media at companies like Mattel Interactive, Riverdeep Interactive and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Clynton went from a publishing focus to a production focus upon joining ZOO. There he works with publishers interested in optimizing their creative production workflows while integrating ZOO’s ebook solutions for internal ebook authoring and conversion. And with its emphasis on fixed layout formats, ZOO’s tools are making it easier for publishers to produce their own ebook versions of children’s books, cookbooks, comics and more, with enhanced features.

Dr. Jeff Jaffe is Chief Executive Officer of the World Wide Web Consortium. In this role he works with Director Tim Berners-Lee, staff, and membership, and the public to evolve and communicate the W3C's vision. He is responsible for all of W3C's global operations, for maintaining the interests of all of W3C's stakeholders, and for sustaining a culture of cooperation and transparency, so that W3C continues to be the leading forum for the technical development and stewardship of the Web.

Bill Kasdorf is General Editor of The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing and VP of Apex Content Solutions, Apex CoVantage. Active in many standards initiatives, Bill was Metadata Subgroup Lead of the IDPF EPUB 3 WG and is active on the Indexing WG; chairs BISG’s Content Structure Committee and the PSV-to-EPUB Mapping Committee of the nextPub WG; and is active in NISO’s eBook SIG. Past President of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), Bill has written and spoken widely for publishing industry organizations such as SSP, O’Reilly TOC, NISO, BISG, IDPF, AAP, AAUP, ALPSP, STM, IDEAlliance, Seybold, and the Library of Congress.

George Kerscher began his IT innovations in 1987 and coined the term “print disabled.” George is dedicated to developing technologies that make information not only accessible, but also fully functional in the hands of persons who are blind or who have a print disability. He believes properly designed information systems can make all information accessible to all people and is working to push evolving technologies in this direction.

As Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium and President of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), Kerscher is a recognized international leader in document access. In addition, Kerscher is the Senior Officer of Accessible Technology at Learning Ally in the USA. He chairs the DAISY/NISO Standards committee, and serves on the USA National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS) Board.

As Vice President of Digital Strategy within Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Trade Publishing division, Sanj Kharbanda is responsible for the digital development of well-known children’s book characters such as Curious George, Gossie, and Martha Speaks, as well as digital product strategy to support HMH’s collection of bestselling fiction and non-fiction titles. Enabling story-telling across multiple touch-points including web, apps and interactive ebooks, Sanj also leads website strategy, digital product campaigns and e-commerce across the Trade Publishing division. Follow Sanj @sanjjk.

Chris Kitchener is a Group Product Manager at Adobe, responsible for the InDesign and Illustrator family of products. Kitchener’s experience at Adobe spans product management, marketing and business development. In his current role, Kitchener drives the development of some of the industry's leading print and digital publishing tools—from print to tablet, web, mobile and beyond. Before joining Adobe in 2001, Kitchener spent three years as a helicopter navigator in the Royal Navy before training as a commercial pilot. Kitchener speaks regularly at industry events on a variety of publishing topics, including authoring tools, workflow productivity, and the future of print and digital publishing.

Sanders Kleinfeld has been employed at O’Reilly Media since 2004 and has held a variety of positions, including roles on O’Reilly’s Production, Editorial, and Tools teams. Currently, he works as Publishing Technology Engineer, maintaining O’Reilly’s XML-based toolchain for generating EPUB and Mobi formats of both frontlist and backlist titles. He also helps coordinate O’Reilly’s digital distribution efforts to electronic sales channels, and is currently assisting in R&D efforts surrounding HTML5 and EPUB 3, helping to develop next-generation ebook content for O’Reilly and its publishing partners. In his spare time, Sanders loves to read, but primarily print books.

Sanders is the author of HTML5 for Publishers (O’Reilly, 2011).

Anne Kubek is Executive Vice President & General Manager of INscribe Digital, a technology company specializing in ebook distribution, marketing and sales reporting.

Prior to INscribe, Anne was EVP of Merchandising and Marketing for Borders Group, Inc., the nation’s second largest book retailer. Anne also served as Senior Vice President of Stores, overseeing nearly 1,000 Borders and Waldenbooks stores from 2004-2008. From 2001-2004, Anne was VP of Marketing & Merchandising - Books.

Anne earned her Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan in 1988. She received her MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan in 2004, with honors in Beta Gamma Sigma. Anne is a member of the Alumni Board of Governors at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

Allen Lau is the co-founder and CEO of Wattpad, the world's largest community of readers and writers. 

With years of experience building successful mobile tech companies, Allen first started prototyping a mobile eReading app in 2002 on an old grey-scale Java phone that could only display 5 lines of text. He wanted to solve a problem he was facing - how to read while on the go. So for the past 10 years Allen has been exploring the power of mobile/social collaboration, online communities, and user-generated content.

Wattpad now serves over 15 million people a month and with over 10 million stories uploaded, Allen is leading a team that's building a new reading experience on the web and across every mobile device.

Matt MacInnis is Inkling’s Chief Executive Officer. He founded Inkling in 2009 on a mission to rethink the way we publish, a journey that began first with the textbook and has moved to much more. Today, Inkling is building powerful software that enables publishers to connect with consumers of knowledge in powerful new ways.

Before founding Inkling, Matt spent eight years at Apple, beginning in marketing, moving into product, and then running Apple’s education market development team in Asia, based in Beijing. After helping to grow Apple’s business in the region, Matt returned to Apple’s California headquarters to lead Apple’s growth in education globally.

A native of northeastern Canada, Matt earned a degree in Electrical Engineering with a Citation in Mandarin Chinese from Harvard University. Both Matt and Inkling are based in San Francisco. He’s on Twitter at @stanine.

Steve Matteson is the Creative Type Director for Monotype, one of the world's leading typographic resources. With an education in printing and the book arts from Rochester Institute of Technology Steve began designing typefaces 25 years ago. Clients such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Barnes and Noble use custom typefaces he created both for user interfaces and for extended reading in digital products. Recently Steve worked with MIT in a laboratory study to examine the effects of typography on driver's off-the-road glance time. He resides in Louisville, CO.

Liisa McCloy-Kelley is VP, Director eBook Development & Innovation at Random House, Inc. where she has been an eyewitness to an evolution in the way that books are produced, marketed and sold for more than 20 years. She currently leads the team responsible for eBook development and production and keeps Random House on a focused strategic path for digital product development. She has spoken at a variety of conferences and has taught at Wellesley, NYU and Yale. As a digital book evangelist, she has given up reading in print form to become an expert in the variety of digital reading systems and the ways they can present content.

Bill McCoy is Executive Director of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), the trade and standards group responsible for the EPUB standard interchange and delivery format for eBooks and other digital publications. Mr. McCoy was previously General Manager, Digital Publishing at Adobe Systems. McCoy has been involved in publishing technology for over 20 years, and has contributed to the establishment of numerous industry-standard platforms including EPUB as well as PDF, OpenType, and PostScript.

Hugh McGuire builds new publishing models on the web. He is the founder of PressBooks, an online book publishing platform, and LibriVox, he largest library of free, public domain audiobooks in the world, all created by volunteers. He is the co-editor, with Brian O’Leary, of “Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto” — a collection of essays from the bleeding edge of publishing. He can be found on Twitter at @hughmcguire.

Kristen McLean is a book futurist, consumer zoologist, and idea omnivore. She is also the founder & CEO of Bookigee, a Miami-based company that develops groundbreaking tools and innovative analytics to help the $28B book publishing industry meet the digital future. Their first product, WriterCube, helps authors discover their audience & marketing opportunities. Additionally, she is the co-chair of O’Reilly Media’s Author (R)evolution Day project, and she speaks nationally and internationally about the future of authorship, books, and publishing. When Kristen isn’t building her company or speaking about the future of publishing, she’s on the prowl for great coffee and interesting conversation.

Craig Mod is a writer and designer who splits his time between San Francisco and Tokyo. He is a MacDowell writing fellow and a TechFellow Award recipient for product design and marketing. He was previously a product designer at Flipboard. He is also the co-author of the Tokyo city guide, Art Space Tokyo. 

Richard Nash is VP of Community and Content of Small Demons. He previously ran the iconic indie Soft Skull Press (for which work he was awarded the Association of American Publishers' Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing) and the insurgent publishing start-up Red Lemonade. Books he edited and published landed on bestseller lists from the Boston Globe to the Singapore Straits-Times; on Best of the Year lists from The Guardian to the Toronto Globe & Mail to the Los Angeles Times; Lydia Millet’s Love in Infant Monkeys, was selected as a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist; and Vanessa Veselka's Zazen won the 2011 PEN Award for Best First Novel. In 2010 the Utne Reader named him one of Fifty Visionaries Changing Your World and Mashable.com picked him as the #1 Twitter User Changing the Shape of Publishing. He has spoken at universities, festivals, conferences and symposia around the world on the history and future of writing, reading and publishing.

Bob Oeste, Ph.D., is Senior Programmer/Analyst at the Johns Hopkins University Press and chief developer of Allbooks, a title management system currently under license to more than a dozen publishers. He has served as advisor on a federally funded project to develop DocTracker, a free software suite to facilitate digital-only publication of historical documentary editions. Prior to his IT career, he worked for the U.S. State Department, managed a variety of successful book promotional campaigns, and published a novel with Random House. Bob is a frequent presenter at conferences and has worked as a consultant with both large and small publishers in the U.S. and abroad.

John Ossenmacher is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of ReDigi Inc., the world's first online marketplace for the resale of pre-owned digital media, one of the most significant technologies to emerge in the digital space. Ossenmacher has captured international attention by making ReDigi the world leader in digital resale while working vigorously to ensure that the rights of the consumer, artists, authors and copyright holders are incorporated into its revolutionary service with positive global impact.

ReDigi has created a significant technological solution with its core team of MIT graduates and Faculty. ReDigi's technology is covered by numerous patent applications and functions to insure the rights of all are protected in a far superior way than ever before previously thought possible and protects the integrity of the process from those looking to misuse digital content.

Laura Hazard Owen is the digital book publishing reporter at paidContent/GigaOM. She was previously the editor of Publishing Trends. She lives in New York.

Nicole Passage is the managing editor at Open Road Integrated Media. She attended the University of Oregon and holds an MS in publishing from NYU. Prior to Open Road, Nicole was a production editor in the publishing division of leading hair and beauty education provider Pivot Point International, in Evanston, Illinois.

Steve Potash is President and CEO of OverDrive, a company he founded in 1986. Under his leadership, OverDrive has become the world's leading multichannel digital distributor, building a digital catalog of more than 1 million in-copyright titles and supplying 22,000 libraries, schools and retailers worldwide. A noted eBook pioneer, Mr. Potash was a founding member of the Open eBook Forum (now International Digital Publishing Forum) in 1999 and also served as president. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Mr. Potash earned a B.A. in Journalism from The Ohio State University and his J.D. from the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.

John Prabhu has 19 years of experience in developing solutions through all stages of the publishing cycle. John’s focus has been in developing a unified approach to print-digital publishing and operational workflow strategies around eBook / XML production, semantic coding and enrichment, CMS / LMS and customer back-office support. John is a member of the IDPF working group evolving EPUB3 specifications and IMS Global Consortium (Common Cartridge & QTI standards) towards Educational Technology industry.

As the Vice President, Solutions Architect at SPi Global, John is focused in developing new services and products; implementing models for simultaneous digital publishing workflows with a goal of ensuring customer voice integrated to product development.

Corey taught anthropology for 12 years before founding Exprima Media, a software design and development company that partners with content providers to envision, design, and develop compelling and effective interactive experiences. Corey delivers presentations on a variety of topics including the future of publishing, interaction design, and global mobile initiatives.

Dominique Raccah is a publishing entrepreneur whose work at Sourcebooks, the company she began in 1987 with only ONE title, is changing the landscape of publishing. From the start, Raccah has directed a continuously growing entrepreneurial company that has morphed into a general trade house, happily producing 30+ New York Times Bestsellers, #1 category leaders that range from baby names books to college guides, and a publishing company that many consider on the leading edge of the digital transformation. Most recently, Dominique managed the launch of PutMeInTheStory.com, a personalized storybook platform of best-selling children’s picture books. 

Dominique currently serves as co-chair of the Board of Directors of the Book Industry Study Group.

Chantal Restivo-Alessi is the Chief Digital Officer for HarperCollins Publishers, leading the overall global digital strategy for the company. She manages the commercial relationships with existing and new digital partners to grow digital revenues worldwide. She works with each division around the world, and is member of the company’s executive committee. She was appointed to this role in May 2012. 

Restivo-Allessi has extensive expertise in strategy development and execution, as well as change management in the media space. She has held numerous senior strategy positions and has more than 20 years of international media management experience. She joined HarperCollins from ING Bank in London, where she was Head of Media Corporate Finance. In addition, she has worked at Aegis Group PLC in senior strategy and operational roles, EMI music, and Booz & Company. 

Restivo-Alessi is fluent in six languages, holds an MBA from Columbia University, a Masters in Foreign Trade and International Marketing from ICE Italian Institute, and a Laurea (MA) in International Political Sciences from University of Rome. 

Diana Rhoten is the CSO for Amplify, where she is responsible for internal planning, external communications and partnership development. Previously, Diana cofounded and codirected Startl, which was dedicated to advising and accelerating for-profit start-ups in the digital learning and education technology markets. Prior to that, she served as faculty at the Stanford University School of Education, program director in the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure and policy analyst to Governor Weld. She has published extensively on topics related to the sociology of education and innovation. Diana has a PhD and MA from Stanford, an MEd from Harvard, and a BA from Brown. She is both a Fulbright Scholar and a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer.

Bill Rosenblatt is president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a consulting firm whose clients include publishers and digital media technology companies ranging from startups to Global 500. Bill brings publishers expertise in areas such as content management and distribution, cross-media strategy, digital rights, and content monetization models, and he provides technology vendors with market strategy, business development, and product management services. Bill publishes the blog Copyright and Technology and chairs the Copyright and Technology conferences in New York and London. 

Before founding GiantSteps in 2000, Bill was chief technology officer of Fathom, an Internet content and education company backed by Columbia University and other scholarly institutions. He has been a technology and new media executive at McGraw-Hill and Times Mirror Company, and he served as manager of strategic marketing for media and publishing at Sun Microsystems. He was the architect of Moody’s Investors Service’s digital publishing platform in the pre-Internet early 90s.

Yohei Sadoshima started his career as a manga editor in 2002 in Kodansha. During his 10 year career, he had worked on Takehiko Inoue’s “Vagabond”, Norifusa Mita’s “Dragon Zakura”, Moyoco Anno’s “Hataraki man”, Chuya Koyama’s “Uchu Kyoudai(Space Brothers)” and made them big-sellers with his unique promotion projects with TOHO, NTV, Dentsu etc. He left Kodansha and founded Cork Inc. in 2012.

Josh Schanker is founder and president of BookBub. He launched the company in 2012 with the mission of helping readers discover authors through daily ebook price promotions. One year later, the service has more than 1 million subscribers and is working with big-six publishers, dozens of mid-sized and small publishing houses, and hundreds of bestselling independent authors.

Josh has worked in digital media for more than a decade and is a repeat entrepreneur.Previous companies he started include Sombasa Media, an email marketing firm bought by About.com, and Sconex, a social networking site for teens bought by Alloy Media + Marketing. Although most of his career has focused on entrepreneurship, it began with his first full-time job 20 years ago as a bookseller for Waldenbooks. Josh is an alum of Harvard College and MIT Sloan.

Robin Seaman is Director of Content Acquisition for Benetech’s Bookshare initiative, the global online library of content for readers with print disabilities, working across all publishing sectors to forge partnerships with Bookshare. She has been in book publishing in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area for twenty-five years and has worked in a variety of marketing roles for Macmillan, Oxford University Press, The Crown Publishing Group, HarperSanFrancisco and IDG Books. She joined NuvoMedia in 1999 as Director of Content for the Rocket eBook, the first dedicated electronic reading device, and continued in that role when Gemstar acquired both NuvoMedia and its competitor, SoftBook. In 2008, she joined Benetech, the Palo Alto-based nonprofit founded by the Silicon Valley social entrepreneur and MacArthur Fellow, Jim Fruchterman, which is dedicated to making technology solutions available for social causes that the market does not support (human rights, the environment, literacy). Bookshare, launched in 2002, has over 250,000 members, 185,000 titles in its collection—half of which have been contributed by publishers—and agreements with over 200 publishers in the U.S. and internationally. It operates in a dozen countries around the world.

Phil Sexton is the Publisher of Writer’s Digest. Over more than 20 years in the book business, he has served in numerous capacities, including Vice President of Sales for F+W Media, Sales Director of Adams Media, Director of Merchandising for United Magazine Company and Independent Bookseller. He is the author of A Picture is Worth 1000 Words, Legends of Literature and The Writer’s Lab, and co-author of The Writer’s Book of Matches. He is also the co-founder and co-editor of the much loved (and sorely missed) literary journal, Fresh Boiled Peanuts.

Daihei Shiohama has more than 30 years of successful corporate and entrepreneurial experience in media, entertainment and international business in Japan, Asia, U.S. and Europe. No stranger to the media and entertainment business, Shiohama has worked with many international brands and media companies as key executive in management capacities. Recently, he has been engaged very actively in developing eBook business for Japan and U.S. He has supported the IDPF Executive Office at the IDPF event in Tokyo in 2012. He is based in San Diego, California.

Evan St. Lifer is Scholastic Library Publishing’s Vice President of Digital Initiatives, which includes Grolier Online, BookFlix, TrueFlix, and FreedomFlix. St. Lifer is currently engaged in dialogue with many of the nation’s largest school districts about Common Core, their emerging digital content and mobile needs, and how best to meet them.

St. Lifer plays a central role in Scholastic’s continued efforts to ensure that all children benefit from access to quality print and digital resources both at the library, in school and remotely, with a particular emphasis on Family Engagement and Early Learning and now the Common Core. During his tenure at Scholastic, St. Lifer has been responsible for the creation and launch of print and digital products and services for the Library, Early Childhood, After School, and Family Literacy Markets.

St. Lifer joined Scholastic from School Library Journal (SLJ) where he served as Editor-In-Chief.  While at SLJ he launched a number of successful ventures including Curriculum Connections and the SLJ Leadership Summit.

Earlier in his career, St. Lifer wrote/edited for the New York Times, Crain’s New York Business, and Random House, and earlier in his career also worked in broadcast TV for ESPN, Star Search, and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. 

Brad Stone has covered Amazon and technology in Silicon Valley for over 14 years, for publications such as Newsweek and the New York Times. He is currently a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek and lives in San Francisco, California.

Michael is the Chief Content Officer at Kobo, responsible for sales, publisher and industry relations, content acquisition, and the merchandising experience across Kobo's web and mobile services. Prior to joining Kobo, Michael was the founding CEO of the supply chain agency BookNet Canada, where he launched the national sales reporting service BNC SalesData and authored the publishing technology call-to-arms "Six Projects That Could Change Publishing for the Better." 

Tamblyn also co-founded Canada's first online bookstore Bookshelf.ca, purchased by Indigo Books & Music in 1998, and served as Vice President of Online Operations. 

Michael has a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Western Ontario.

Pip Tannenbaum is the Digital Manager at Parragon Books, the largest illustrated non-fiction publisher in the world. Her responsibilities include the development, production, and distribution of Parragon’s lifestyle, reference and children’s ebook content. Under Pip’s direction, Parragon’s digital production team puts an emphasis on optimizing their creative production workflows in order to create quality, multi-platform content to enrich and entertain readers all around the globe.

Rebecca leads Alvo’s work to help schools across the country bring technology and instructional innovation together with effective, traditional practices. Working closely with Blended Learning’s early adopters like Rocketship Education, Rebecca’s vision for Alvo is shaped deeply by her years working as a classroom teacher with at risk high school English Learners at Bell Gardens High Schools in Bell Gardens, California. A fierce advocate for English Learners and their families, Rebecca was awarded the California Association of Bilingual Educators' Teacher of the Year Award in 2002 for her advocacy and advancing student achievement among her students. 

In 2007 she left the classroom to work on scalable classroom supports. After designing and running the nation’s first statewide student achievement data management program for the California Charter Schools Association, Rebecca joined the senior management team at KC Distance Learning, later K12, Inc., where she was the Senior Director of Instruction and Evaluation for online learning implementations across the country. 

Prior to focusing her work on education reform, Rebecca spent several years in private sector equity research, financial marketing, and mergers and acquisitions in New York, Germany and London with companies including Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Cushman & Wakefield. She has been an adjunct professor and advisory board member at Claremont Graduate University, School of Education, Portland State University and Lewis & Clark College.

Mark Ury is the CEO and cofounder of Storybird, one of the world's fastest-growing storytelling communities with over 2 million members and 130,000 schools on the platform. An experience architect by trade, Mark has advised brands such as Nike, Starbucks, BMW, and Apple on digital strategy, service design, and product development.

Gus Vibal is the President and CEO of the Vibal Group of Companies, the leading proponent of digital education in the Philippines and the country’s largest educational publisher. In the Philippines, the name Vibal is synonymous with textbooks. With 60% market share in the public school sector and 30% share in the private school market, millions of Filipino students have used the company’s portfolio of textbooks and educational materials at one point in their lives. Backed by this rich publishing heritage spanning six decades, Gus is transitioning Vibal from print educational publishing into an integrated technology solutions company offering e-learning and enterprise mobile products developed for schools from the ground up by Filipino engineers. His vision is to transform learning into an engaging, enriching, social, collaborative, and fun experience. Forging partnerships with major Philippine schools in 2012, Vibal launched the country’s first interactive ePub 3.0 e-textbooks embedded with audio, video, and self-scoring quizzes; an e-reading mobile app Vibe Reader available on Android, iOS and Windows 7 and 8; and the Philippines’ first commercial e-bookstore Vibe Bookstore. Vibal has deployed 18,000 e-books to more than 8,000 tablet devices and is set to deliver close to 100,000 e-textbooks in June 2013. The company is also set to unveil its latest product – an offline/online e-learning management system called VSmart that can enable integrated e-textbook reading, social learning, and learning analytics even with none or intermittent Internet connection.

Steve Vinter serves as Engineering Director at Google, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he leads Google's Digital Publishing team responsible for Google Play Books, Google Play Magazines, and Currents. Steve joined Google in March 2007 as the site lead of a team of 40 with the charter to build Google's presence in Massachusetts. Google Cambridge today has more than 800 people, working in such diverse areas as Knowledge, YouTube, Android, Chrome, and Travel.

In addition to his Google responsibilities, Steve serves as a Vice President and Board member of the Kendall Square Association, is an Executive Committee Member and Talent Sub-Group Chair of the Massachusetts Tech Hub Collaborative, is on the Lt. Governor's STEM Advisory Council, and is on the Advisory Council of MIT's Office of Engineering Outreach Programs. He received a B.S. in Computer Science and Statistics from the University of Michigan in 1978 and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1983 and 1985, respectively.

Roger Webster is Chief Architect of Barnes & Noble’s Digital Products group. An avid reader, Roger has over thirty years’ experience as a software engineer, and a career-long interest in the technological underpinnings of reading, text, and related topics. Roger joined B&N in April, 2010 to pursue the future of reading, and has driven key innovations at B&N Digital Products including magazines, children’s books, enhanced eBooks, direct hardware acceleration of the user experience and more. Roger is a member of the Board of Directors of the IDPF, and an active participant in the ongoing development of ePub 3. Roger has over thirty years’ experience at companies including Adobe, Pixo, IBM, Apple and FileNet.

John Wheeler is an industry veteran with over 20 years experience in publishing and expertise in the development and deployment of ePublishing, eLearning, and Multimedia solutions, bringing a unique perspective to the discussion having worked on both sides of the business. As SVP for Strategy and Emerging Technologies, he works closely with SPi Global’s operations team in developing technology-enabled solutions that offer higher-value services and position the company as a strategic partner to its clients.

Prior to joining SPi Global, John was with Elsevier for more than six years as Director, Multimedia Production where he was responsible for the production of all electronic products supporting Elsevier’s global publications.