Board election 2019

A self-nomination period started on August 24th, 2019, for two seats a the Board of Directors of EDRLab. Its goal was to fill the seats occupied by Cristina Mussinelli (Fondazione LIA) and Alexandre Lemaire (Réseau Carel) since June 2017. The self-nomination period ended early September.

Here are the candidate statements:

Cristina Mussinelli

I am kindly asking you to support my nomination for re-election in the EDRLab Board of Directors. I am running as Secretary General of Fondazione LIA (Libri Italiani Accessibili).

As done in my first term as Board member I will continue to actively support EDRLab, with my effort, knowledge and relationships, to achieve its mission of fostering the development of an open, interoperable and accessible digital publishing ecosystem in Europe. My presence in the Board as representative of an Italian organization, will also meet the goal of EDRLab of reflecting the European diversity.

In particular, I will do all my best to collaborate with the EDRLab management to define our main priorities for the next years and to achieve the following goals:

• support a wider and faster adoption of open standard as EPUB, by publishers for all different kind of publications (school texts, illustrated books, enhanced books, and complex layout books in general) with the provision of updated and timely information on the standard in general and on the activities of the working group, also through dedicated event or seminars, such as the Digital Publishing Summit.
• continue to develop reference open-source reading engine on every device platform available as the basis for developers to be able to provide good reading applications compliant with open standards.
• create awareness on the importance of standard adoption and related interoperability issue in the whole publishing value chain and in the international and European institutions involved in defining the policy for the publishing market.
• continue the commitment in the field of the accessibility of digital publishing contents for print impaired persons, especially taking in consideration the adoption of the EU Accessibility Act.
• make a specific plan to foster the growth of the European and international membership.

My role in Fondazione LIA, a non-profit organization that promotes the adoption of accessibility in the publishing industry through awareness-raising events, research on digital accessibility, training courses and consultancy activities, where I am also coordinating many activities at EU and international level will be particularly relevant for EDRLab. LIA’s initiatives are, in fact, strictly in line with the EDRLab commitment in the field of accessibility as they aim at expanding the access to editorial products of visually impaired readers: LIA encourages the integration and active participation in the cultural world of people with visual impairment, allowing to choose how, when and, above all, what to read.

Furthermore Fondazione LIA is an organization created by AIE (Associazione Italiana Editori), one of the major EU trade associations, where I am also responsible of digital publishing activities. This could continue providing EDRLab a strong support in the European market to achieve its goals, thanks to consolidated relations with the most relevant European institutions and a long lasting knowledge of the European publishing market. European publishers are investing in digital production processes, products and services and the attendance in the European market of the main international players is growing thus our focus on open standard definition issues, will be fundamental for the growth of on European market of digital contents, for fair competition and for the reduction of technological lock-in risks for consumers. AIE is one of the founders of FEP, the Federation of European Publishers, and is also part of the General Confederation of Italian Industries, it is member of IPA (International Publishers Association), EDITEUR, ISBN International Agency and ABPTOE (Association of Booksellers and Publishers Training Organizations in Europe). Finally, AIE devotes particular attention to the development of publishing standards, manages the Italian ISBN agency and the multilingual European DOI Registration Agency.

I am also member of the W3C Digital Publishing Business Group, the international community developing and maintaining the Web standards, and invited expert in the ‘OT UNI/CT 014/SC 04 “Automazione e documentazione” where I am involved in the standardization process of EPUB and of LPC: I will able to support the EDRLab activities in these organization too.

MY PERSONAL EXPERTISE IN THE AREA OF DIGITAL PUBLISHING
My professional activity is focused on the features of technologic innovation, with particular attention for content industry. The projects I have followed in my career, at both domestic and international level, allowed me to acquire a considerable competence in the management of complex tasks with a high content of technological innovation I have a deep understanding of the dynamics and the difficulties that technology implementation processes carry with them in terms of economic development, corporate reorganization, creation of new competences and skills.

Many of such projects and, in particular, European ones involved multiple international subjects and also included the constant use of the main international standards for cataloguing and identification such as ISBN, DOI, Onix etc. With 15 years’ experience as consultant and digital publishing manager in the Italian Publishers Association, I have strong links with most of the publishers operating in the Italian publishing market and thanks to my involvement in many European and international projects I have strong relationships outside Italy too.

As Secretary General of Fondazione LIA I am responsible of and I am also in charge for the relations with the most important Italian associations and organizations operating in the area of accessible content,

As responsible of digital publishing for AIE I am in charge of the coordination of AIE training programs in technology innovation in the publishing market. I also provide expert support to associated publishers on all aspects related to technological innovation in different publishing sectors (production workflow, new products and services development, legal issues, DRM, technical solutions, etc.) and create and manage links between AIE and other companies, organizations, associations and national, European and international institutions on the same issues. A particularly relevant side of my experience regards teaching and training activities focused on the development of technologies and their impact on production and distribution processes. These turned into planning and organization of an articulated series of training projects, both traditional and e-learning. I write articles on digital publishing teach in major post graduate courses related to multimedia and digital publishing in traditional classes, eLearning and blended e-learning methodologies and I am often invited to conferences and seminars as an expert in the digital publishing field.

Erik Pattenden

Erik Pattenden, CTO of Firsty Group (Newbury, UK), is an IT architect working on e-commerce, direct digital fulfilment and traditional print fulfilment solutions across the publishing industry. These projects have been for clients such as Bonnier, Macmillan, Hachette and Bloomsbury.

In digital fulfilment, Erik is the product owner at Firsty of Glassboxx, a unique direct to consumer (D2C) solution designed to enable authors, publishers and retailers to sell their audiobooks and eBooks directly to the end customer, with full, flexible, frictionless Digital Rights Management. Glassboxx uses LCP in Readium 1 and Readium 2, and Firsty have been one of the very first to integrate LCP into live end user apps on Android and iOS, with desktop apps due imminently.

Being flexible and open source, Firsty see a very significant long term future for LCP and are keen to help with its direction and evolution at Board level.

Prior to being at Firsty, Erik was involved in IT development projects for large corporates in banking and manufacturing.