Report on the Annual General Meeting of EDRLab

The EDRLab AGM was held on June 13, 2017. Pierre Danet, President of the association, passed away a few days before the meeting; Arnaud Robert, legal counsel of the Hachette Group and substitute to Pierre at the board of EDRLab, pronounced a vibrant tribute to the man who was so active in many worldwide initiatives for an open and interoperable publishing industry, and instrumental in the creation of the Lab.

Membership

EDRLab now counts 37 European members, with a large majority of French companies: this balance must evolve and the Lab must become more international. Therefore, two important decisions were taken during the AGM:

1. It is no more required to be an active Readium or IDPF member before joining EDRLab. This decision finds its roots in the end of the IDPF.
2. It is no more required to have its headquarter in the European Union to become an EDRLab member. Therefore, companies and non-profit organizations interested in our work on publishing standards, accessibility and open-source development can join the association, whatever their nationality is.

New directors of the board

This meeting was the proper time to approve the nomination of Cristina Mussinelli (LIA, an Italian foundation focusing on accessibility) and Alexandre Lemaire (Réseau Carel, a network of European public libraries) as new Directors of the board, board now composed of:

• Virginie Clayssen (Editis), as vice-president & Treasurer
• Alban Cerisier (Madrigall), as vice-president & Secretary
• Arnaud Robert (Hachette), substitute to Pierre Danet
• Vincent Montagne (Média-Participations)
• Pierre Dutilleul (SNE)
• Michel Lanneau (Cercle de la Librairie)
• François Rouyet-Gayette (CNL)
• Nicolas George (French state)
• Patrick Cocquet (Cap Digital)
• Bente Saetervoll (Readium)
• Hadrien Gardeur (Feedbooks)
• Jean-Marie Geffroy (Mantano)
• Cristina Mussinelli (LIA)
• Alexandre Lemaire (Réseau Carel)

A new President of the association will be elected during the next board meeting, in July.

Ongoing projects

In the past 18 months, EDRLab has launched a series of projects aiming at developing an open, interoperable and accessible publishing ecosystem:

• The implementation of Readium LCP, an open and cost effective DRM solution, which is currently deployed in different countries and should be visible to the public by the end of the year 2017.
• The maintenance of the current implementation of the Readium codebase in its two flavors, the Web-oriented Readium JS and the mobile-oriented Readium SDK. A stable codebase, now adapted to Readium LCP and in (quite complex) maintenance mode.
• The development of a new Readium codebase, named Readium-2: a modern and flexible framework replicated in different languages – Go for server side solution, Swift on iOS, Java/Kotlin on android, Typescript/javascript for Web and desktop applications. An SDK also adapted to Readium LCP in the coming months.
• The development of Readium Desktop, an end-user product usable on Windows, Linux and MacOS, Readium LCP compliant, with an open-source codebase based on the Readium-2 framework.
• The promotion of native accessibility in France and Europe, in liaison with the international Daisy Consortium and the French Syndicat national de l’édition (SNE).

These projects are all active in 2017 and, for some of them, will be finalized by the end of the year, with a core team of 5, composed of:

• Laurent Le Meur as CTO;
• Daniel Weck and Cyrille Lebeaupin as Lead Developers (part time);
• Alexandre Camilleri as Developer;
• Fernando Pinto da Silva as Accessibility Expert (part time);

and

• Trainee developers (currently Léo Stéfani);
• Other freelance developers or experts on a per project basis (Luc Maumet, Jiminy Panoz, Aferdita Muriqi, Fred Chasen …).

Liaisons

EDRLab is now liaising with many other non-profit organizations, as shown in the illustration below. This network of expertise will be useful for achieving our goals.

Web Publications and EPUB 4

A new and important project is starting in 2017: after the combination of the IDPF with the W3C, the new W3C Publishing Working Group has launched its work on future standards for the publishing industry: Web Publications and EPUB 4. EDRLab, member of the W3C since June 2016, is an active participant to this new initiative.

More on this on this page.

Working Groups

Also of interest for the publishing community, EDRLab is launching three new internal Working Groups (completing the Readium LCP and Readium-2 WGs):

1. The BD, comics & manga WG, which will propose to the W3C new ways to express new forms of sequential arts using the future EPUB 4 standard;
2. The audiobooks WG, which will propose to the W3C an efficient way to represent audiobooks (metadata and structure) using EPUB 4.

If you feel that your organization should participate to these efforts, please join the association asap.