Stephen Abram, MLS, is the President – 2008 of SLA and the past-President of the Canadian Library Association and Vice President Innovation for SirsiDynix and Chief Strategist for the SirsiDynix Institute. He has been VP of Corporate Development for Micromedia ProQuest and Publisher Electronic Information for Thomson. He ran libraries for Suncor, Coopers & Lybrand, Smith Lyons Torrance Stevenson and Mayer and Hay Group. Stephen has been listed by Library Journal as one of their first “Mover and Shakers”, the ’key’ people influencing the future of libraries and librarianship.

Kurt Beidler is Senior Manager of business development at Amazon.com. He has several years of experience in the books industry, including working with the industry leaders in printing, publishing, and book retailing. Kurt also holds advanced degrees from Princeton University, Lehigh University, and University of Washington.

Gavin designs social software for the Nature Publishing Group. He has worked in web product development since the mid-90s. Large scale web applications covering identity management, on-demand media and social software have been the main focus of his work. Gavin lives in London with his wife and son. He writes on nascent for Nature and on take one onion. His personal website is gavinbell.com.

Kirk is a seasoned Internet professional with a diverse media background. As principal of Oxford Media Works Kirk consults with clients on a range of issues related to web publishing and new media strategies. Kirk also contributes regular commentary on new media to Medialoper.com where he has written extensively about DRM and the consumer experience.

Andrew Bolwell is a Business Development Director for HP’s Corporate Ventures unit, with the charter to proactively identify and pursue new market opportunities that have the potential to be significant, game changing, and disruptive new businesses for HP. In this role, Andrew has been instrumental in helping incubate new businesses for HP across a diverse range of markets and industries including mobility, telecom, media and entertainment, publishing and Web2.0.

Maria Bonn is Director of the Scholarly Publishing Office at the University of Michigan University Library. She has a 1990 PhD in English Literature from the University of Buffalo, with a concentration in twentieth century fiction. After several years of itinerant teaching and writing, she returned to school for her masters degree in information studies. At the University of Michigan Library she worked as an interface specialist and in digital library development before taking on her current role leading the Library’s publishg effort.

Andrew Bridges is a litigation partner in the firm’s San Francisco office and concentrates his practice on litigation and strategic counseling with respect to trademark, copyright, advertising, consumer protection, unfair competition, trade secrets, Internet regulation, and media law.

Mr. Bridges is a highly regarded litigator who has been the lead counsel in a variety of notable intellectual property cases, including his successful defense of Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. in a landmark case brought by the Recording Industry Association of America to ban distribution of the Rio MP3 music player; his successful representation (in both the trial court and the U.S. Court of Appeals) on behalf of Stanford Microdevices, blocking Stanford University’s attempt to strip his client of its name during its initial public offering; the successful defense of CNET in a suit brought by Snap-on Tools to prevent the launch of the Snap!Online service; a victory for MasterCard in a secondary copyright and trademark liability defense relating to allegedly infringing merchants. Mr. Bridges also recently successfully defended ClearPlay Inc. in a landmark case brought by 16 Hollywood directors, eight motion picture studios, and the Directors Guild of America under both copyright and trademark law that challenged ClearPlay’s distribution of DVD player control software that allows owners of motion picture DVDs to skip and mute portions of motion picture DVDs to shield their children from violence and other offensive content during the replay of motion picture DVDs. He currently represents several of the best known e-commerce and technology companies in litigation and counseling over a wide range of issues.

Mr. Bridges also represented the Digital Media Association in its amicus curiae brief before the U.S. Court of Appeals in the A&M Records v. Napster case as well as the Consumer Electronics Association, Information Technology Association of America, and other trade associations in an amicus curiae brief before the trial court in Paramount Pictures v. ReplayTV. He was original lead counsel defending StreamCast Networks (the producer of the Morpheus P2P communication software) in the landmark case brought by motion picture studios and record labels in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios v. Grokster.

On the counseling front, Mr. Bridges assists clients with branding portfolio strategies, e-commerce business strategies, and litigation risk avoidance. He has a broad understanding of global copyright, branding, and e-commerce issues with connections to an extensive network of local counsel around the world.

He serves as an early neutral evaluator for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and as a domain name arbitrator for the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva.

Mr. Brooks is senior vice president, global production and manufacturing services at Cengage Learning (formerly Thomson Learning) where his responsibilities include the development, production, and manufacturing of textbooks and reference content in print and digital formats across the Academic and Professional Group, Gale, and International divisions of Cengage Learning. 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.

Bill Burger is vice president of marketing at Copyright Clearance Center, the world’s leading provider of content licensing solutions for corporations and academic institutions. Bill joined the senior management team at CCC in 2005 and leads the company’s product marketing and marketing communications groups.

Roberta Cairney is the founder of Roberta Cairney Law Offices, based in San Francisco. Her practice focuses on transactions involving nearly every form of new, old, and emerging technology.

She has advised a wide array of clients on the use of new technology tools and innovative business models in distributing and developing content and services, including O’Reilly Media, Safari Books Online, Lucasfilm Ltd., Charles Schwab & Co., The Perl Foundation, Chronicle Books, and The Exploratorium.

Howard Campbell has been involved in education for the past fifteen years. A trained teacher and software developer, Howard ventured into publishing in the early 1990s and since 2001 has combined his knowledge of digital technologies, pedagogy and publishing to help traditional print publishers enter the digital space.

Biography coming soon.

William Chesser came to VitalSource in January 1997 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education where he was working as Assistant Director of a nationwide K-12 reform project. He has received a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina and a M.A. in English from North Carolina Central University.

John J. Chodacki is Director of Product Management at Safari Books Online (http://www.safaribooksonline.com), an online service delivering the most important technical and design content from today’s leading publishers. In this role, John leads the product and audience development and innovation efforts for the company’s direct-to-consumer markets. In addition, he serves as Program Manager for Safari Books Online’s Rough Cuts service. Prior to joining Safari Books Online, John served as O’Reilly Media’s Electronic Publishing Manager for five years. He holds an MBA from San Francisco State University.

Amy Cohen was a writer/producer on the sitcoms Caroline in the City and Spin City, a dating columnist for the New York Observer, and the dating correspondent for cable TV’s New York Central. She is the author of THE LATE BLOOMER’S REVOLUTION, published in July 2007 by Hyperion Books. She lives in New York City.

Mark Coker is founder and CEO of Smashwords, a Silicon Valley digital self-publishing service and online bookstore that is changing the way ebooks are published, sampled, marketed and sold. Smashwords launched February 2008 at Tools of Change in New York, where Coker unveiled the company in a Lightning Round presentation.

Coker’s previous startup, BestCalls.com, was acquired and is now owned and operated by the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. His work with BestCalls, as a champion for fair disclosure, was a catalyst for the SEC’s ground breaking Regulation FD. See this link to Wikipedia for more info on BestCalls.

Coker is also co-author, with his wife, of Boob Tube, a novel that explores the wild and wacky world of daytime television soap operas. It was his frustration trying to get Boob Tube published that led him to conclude the traditional book publishing industry is broken, not just from the perspective of authors and publishers, but for readers as well. He believes Smashwords holds the promise to make publishing more profitable for authors and publishers.

Ed Colleran serves as the Senior Director of Rightsholder Relations at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), the world’s premier provider of copyright licensing and compliance solutions. He oversees strategic initiatives focused on CCC’s publisher constituency and manages the development of content licensing solutions and new revenue-generating initiatives for CCC’s participating publishers. Ed also provides the vision for the advancement of CCC’s digital rights management services and is a key contributor on other long-term strategic issues facing the information industry.

Garth most recently served as the General Manager and Vice President Software Engineering for the Gemstar eBook Group. In this position he was responsible for the operation of the division: platform and server engineering, quality assurance, content acquisition, content operations, content engineering, and customer support.

Garth led the Platform, Content Tools and Content Engineering groups for the Gemstar eBook Group. Garth is inventor or co-inventor of seven issued eBook patents; technologies include: cryptography and secure content distribution, eBook UI, resource/database dynamic conversion for cross-platform applications, and optimal paginated document presentation. Garth previously held the position of Vice President of Software Engineering at SoftBook Press.

Prior to the eBook effort, Garth founded Pacer Software and served as its CEO guiding it to a successful acquisition. Following the acquisition of Pacer Garth served as Engineering Director for NetManage, a leading supplier of networking and connectivity solutions.

Scott has 25 years of experience working in the publishing industry in the areas of technology, design, composition, and Web content management. Scott has worked for some of the top publishers in the United States, including Pearson Education, John Wiley & Sons, and Cengage. He has a passion for all things technical, and relentlessly pursues better, smarter, more efficient publishing solutions for bringing product to market in a more timely and more cost-effective manner.

Mr. Cooney is Co-Founder and VP of Business Development of ColorCentric. With over 12 years in the on-demand print industry, Mr. Cooney’s focus at ColorCentric is working with on-line content owners and creators to harness the ColorCentric Real-Time Publishing Model and bring the reality of one-off book manufacturing to life.

Colleen Cosgrove is the trade show specialist for Copyright Clearance Center.

Jody Culkin is currently an Associate Professor at CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College in the Music and Art Department where she teaches in the Multimedia Program. She is an artist who has shown her sculptures, photographs and new media pieces at museums and galleries throughout this country and internationally. She received her BA in Visual Studies from Harvard University and an MPS in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University’s ITP Program.

Bill Damon has been a technologist at Harvard Business School Publishing for nine years, serving in various roles including programmer, researcher, and analyst. In his current role, he is working on using search technologies and metrics to connect online customers to HBSP content. He also leads HBSP’s Gadgetopia group, which explores how trends in consumer electronics are altering the way customers engage with content. Previously, Damon was an independent consultant specializing in web development and user experience.

Susan Danziger is the co-founder, President and Publisher of DailyLit. Danziger brings over 15 years of publishing and licensing experience to DailyLit. She was the head of Business Affairs for one of the divisions at Random House and also joined a team to spearhead Random House’s corporate electronic book program. She founded Fox Meadow Media, which represents international authors and publishers in the acquisition and licensing of publishing and media rights. Danziger graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University and holds a J.D. from New York University School of Law.

Biography coming soon.

Bob DuCharme is a Solutions Architect at Innodata Isogen. Before that, he played a lead role in XML work at LexisNexis and Moody’s Investors Service. He’s written four books and nearly one hundred on-line and print articles about information technology, and maintains a blog on markup and publishing technology at www.snee.com/bobdc.blog.

David Durand has been thinking about and working on the future of information since the 1980’s. He was an early advocate of markup and linking technology (before the web made it commonplace). He was one of the OHCO gang at Brown in the Computing in the Humanities User Group, describing he foundations of content markup.

He received a Doctorate in Computer Science in 2000 for work in collaborative document editing without locking. While he was at BU (and afterwards) he worked for Dynamic Diagrams on web publishing systems for the Science/Technical/Medical market. As CTO at Dynamic Diagrams he led the development of one of the first web site mapping applications (MAPA), and delivered world-class web sites for McGraw-Hill, Nature, the American Medical Association, and many other clients.

He has worked on industry standards over the years, as one of the founding and continuing participants in the W3C’s effort that led to the creation of XML and later XLink, For the IETF he worked on WebDAV and URNs.

With Steven J. DeRose, he wrote Making Hypermedia Work, published by Kluwer.

He is now CEO at Tizra Inc., where he is working on ways to help publishers make the best of the data they have, rather than the data they wish they had.

Having spent virtually his entire life in the gaming and electronics world, founder of Cold Fusion Entertainment David Elmekies brings his extensive, diverse and creative history to the forefront as the driving force behind the brand. David’s accomplished works span the likes of such companies as Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Sega and Vivendi. He has been instrumental in the successful product development of numerous games, having worked with popular and world-renowned cross-platform titles such as Tom Clancy’s Rogue Spear and Rambo Six, BloodRayne, Solider of Fortune and many more. Beyond the gaming realm, David is a leader in introducing cutting-edge electronics. David Elmekies will continue to push the limits of innovation and technology inspiring learning and entertainment.

Adam C. Engst is the publisher of TidBITS, one of the longest-running Internet-based newsletters, and of the Take Control electronic book series. He has authored many best-selling technical books and numerous magazine articles. His innovations include the creation of the first advertising program to support an Internet publication in 1992 and the first flat-rate accounts for graphical Internet access in 1993. He regularly ranks among the top five most influential people in the Macintosh industry and was named one of MacDirectory’s top ten visionaries. He has been turned into an action figure.

Tonya Engst is co-founder of the Take Control series of electronic books, which began in 2003 in order to deliver up-to-date technical content to readers. She currently serves as editor in chief for the series, which continues to innovate in creating, selling, and updating ebooks. Tonya is also known for co-founding and working as Senior Editor for TidBITS, an a Web site and email newsletter about all things Macintosh that has published on a consistent weekly schedule since 1990. Tonya is also a member of the MacNotables podcasting group.

Tamara J. Erickson is both a McKinsey Award-winning author and popular and engaging storyteller. Her compelling views of the future are based on extensive research on changing demographics and employee values and, most recently, on how successful organizations work. Erickson has co-authored three Harvard Business Review articles and the book Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent. She is President of The Concours Institute, the research and education arm of BSG Alliance

Keith Fahlgren is a Publishing Technology Engineer at O’Reilly Media. He’s been involved with a wide variety of XML-centric work there, from integrating content into Safari Books Online to building infrastructure around the Atom Publishing Protocol. He’s a member of the OASIS DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers, a group trying to make the DocBook XML standard more accessible for a wide range of professional publishers, and has played a key role in extending O’Reilly’s use of DocBook and the DocBook-XSL stylesheets. In addition to these successes keeping O’Reilly’s content as flexible and (re-)usable as possible, he’s also been a part of a number of failed attempts at creating the next best tool for (online) authoring (suggestions welcome!).

Karl Fogel is an open source developer and author. After working on CVS and writing “Open Source Development With CVS” (Coriolis, 1999, cvsbook.com), he went to CollabNet, Inc as a founding developer in the Subversion project. Based on his experiences there, he wrote “Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project” (O’Reilly, 2005, producingoss.com). After a brief stint as an Open Source Specialist at Google, he left to become editor of QuestionCopyright.org. He writes and speaks regularly on copyright reform and on the application of open source principles to areas outside software.

Dan Gillmor is founder and director of the Center for Citizen Media, a project to enhance and expand grassroots media and its reach. The center is an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School and the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Gillmor is author of “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People” (O’Reilly Media, 2004), a book that explains the rise of citizens’ media and why it matters.

From 1994 until early 2005 Gillmor was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. During 2005 he co-founded Bayosphere, a San Francisco Bay Area website, which is now part of Backfence.com’s network of hyper-local community sites.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Vermont, Gillmor received a Herbert Davenport fellowship in 1982 for economics and business reporting at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. During the 1986-87 academic year he was a journalism fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied history, political theory and economics. He won or shared in several regional and national journalism awards. Before becoming a journalist he played music professionally for seven years.

As a proven high-energy technical leader with diverse lab and worldwide field experience, Dan is highly-regarded for his ability to match emerging technologies against customer business needs and how to be an intensely productive internal advocate for customers. He is currently focusing his efforts on the incubation of PHP frameworks and runtimes that will help to enable business professionals to create composite applications. Dan holds a Masters Degree in Artificial Intelligence from Polytechnic University, and BA in Computer Science from Manhanttanville College. Dan’s career with IBM has included software and product development projects in the areas of Expert Systems, OS/2, Secure Internet Payment Systems, Web Services and RIA Accessibility. Regardless of the technology domain, Dan’s forte is end-to-end solution consulting – including evangelism, architecture definition, contract negotiations, business development and product promotion – around emerging technologies. His current focus is on the adoption enablement of situational applications by driving customer engagements around IBM’s enterprise mashup technologies. Dan has a keen interest in topics that pertain to the validation of the evolving mashup ecosystem (widget standards, common vernacular, content copyright, monetization, etc) In his spare time Dan is an award wining winemaker and Joomla webmaster for a number of non-profit organizations.

Seth Godin:

• writes the most popular marketing blog in the world;
• is the author of the bestellling marketing books of the last decade;
• speaks to large groups on marketing, new media and what’s next;
• and is the founder of Squidoo.com, a fast-growing recommendation website.

You can read his wikipedia bio, reviews of his seminars and what Google thinks of him.

Rebecca Goldthwaite is the Director, Strategic Partner Management-Production at Cengage Learning [formerly Thomson Learning]. Rebecca led Cengage Learning’s effort to digitize over 1200 backlist titles to enable reuse of content in a media-neutral environment, and repurposing with other publishing groups, such as Custom Publishing. Rebecca has also been at the forefront of other strategic initiatives such as utilizing Semantic Web technologies to better enable content relationships across Cengage Learning and the open web.

Jeff Gomez is the author of five books, including the recent non-fiction title Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age, which was published by Macmillan in November 2007. He is currently the Senior Director of Online Consumer Sales and Marketing for Penguin USA. Jeff has been involved in electronic books and the world of digital reading since the industry’s beginning in 1999, and he has also been a featured speaker and panelist at publishing industry events throughout America.

Scott is the founder and director of the O’Reilly School of Technology, a division of O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Clifford Guren is Senior Director of Publisher Evangelism for Microsoft’s Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects. Prior to joining the Live Search team, Mr. Guren was responsible for Microsoft Reader, Microsoft’s eBook platform. A 25-year veteran in the world of digital content development and publishing, Mr. Guren has also held management positions at Quebecor, Inc., Asymetrix Corporation, and Apple Computer. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University.

Timo Hannay is Publishing Director, Nature.com at the Nature Publishing Group, publishers of Nature and over over seventy other scientific journals, plus numerous online resources for scientists and those interested in science. His areas of responsibility include classified advertising as well as new online initiatives in social software, databases and audio-visual content. Timo trained as a neurophysiologist at the University of Oxford and worked as a journalist (The Economist, Nature Medicine) and a management consultant (McKinsey & Co.) before becoming a publisher. He lived in Japan for over five years and retains a strong interest in, and connections with, the country.

Matt Harris joined VitalSource in March 2000 from Fence Creek Publishing, LLC, where he was Co-Founder and Publisher. Fence Creek specializes in publishing books and material for medical education. Prior to Fence Creek, Matt had been Senior Medical Editor at W.B. Saunders. He has received a B.A. in History from Gettysburg College and a M.B.A. from Pennsylvania State University.

Mr. Haughton has over 20 years of marketing, sales and strategic planning experience with both Fortune 500 companies and high-tech start-ups. He has a broad experience in a number of strategic sales initiatives, including lead generation, networking and web-based selling.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Haughton spent thirteen years in senior management positions at two large investment banks. . At Kidder Peabody, he was SVP- Director of Business Development and the firm’s SVP for Marketing. He was First Vice President and Senior Director of Marketing Services in the Private Client Division of Merrill Lynch.

More recently, Mr. Haughton helped launch an Internet rapid application development software company. At NeuVis, Inc., he was Vice President for the firm’s largest vertical market, responsible for marketing and sales to the financial industry vertical..

He received a BA degree from Vanderbilt University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Ted Hill is President of THA Consulting which provides business development services for publishers and the information industries. With more than 20 years’ experience in the publishing industry, he has launched dozens of new businesses and business initiatives within a broad spectrum of companies ranging from major trade houses, to leading internet companies, to raw startups. Always at the intersection of content and technology, Ted currently serves on the board of directors of the Book Industry Study Group and often speaks at industry conferences and events. He holds a B.A. from Oberlin College.

Ron Hogan created Beatrice.com, one of the first literary websites, in 1995. A decade later, he began writing about the publishing industry for mediabistro.com’s GalleyCat blog. He is also the author of The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane, a visual tribute to ‘70s Hollywood that Publishers Weekly called “one of the year’s most fun” coffee table books.

John R. Ingram was named Vice Chairman of Ingram Industries Inc. in June of 1999. He also serves as Chairman of Ingram Book Group, Lightning Source Inc., and Ingram Digital Group.

He was previously President of Ingram Book Company, Vice President of Purchasing for Ingram Micro Europe, and Director of Purchasing for Ingram Micro Inc. in Santa Ana, California.

Mr. Ingram joined Ingram Industries Inc. in 1986. Early in his career, he served as the Assistant Treasurer of Ingram Industries and as President of Tennessee Book Company, a subsidiary of Ingram Book Group.

He earned his bachelor of arts degree in English from Princeton University in 1984, and received his master of business administration degree in 1986 from the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University.

Mr. Ingram is a member of the Board of Directors of Ingram Micro Inc. and a member of the Board of Directors for the National Book Foundation and the National Center for Learning Disabilities. He serves on the Board of Trustees for Vanderbilt University, Montgomery Bell Academy, and The Harpeth Hall School in Nashville. In addition, Mr. Ingram is Chairman of two capital campaigns, Vanderbilt Athletics and Currey Ingram Academy. He is also a member of the Charles Davis Foundation.

Mr. Ingram is married with four children.

Sam Jaffe is a former staff editor at such publications as BusinessWeek, Bloomberg and The Scientist. He is now a fulltime freelance writer and business consultant. He is the co-author of a book with Rabbi Levi Brackman about Judaism and money.

JEFF JARVIS blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com. He is associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism. He is consulting editor of Daylife, a news startup. He writes a new media column for The Guardian. He consults for media companies. Until 2005, he was president and creative director of Advance.net, the online arm of Advance Publications. Prior to that, Jarvis was creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly; Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News; TV critic for TV Guide and People; a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner; assistant city editor and reporter for the Chicago Tribune; reporter for Chicago Today. He says he is at work on a book.

Michael Jensen has been at the interface between digital technologies and scholarly/academic publishing since the late 1980s. From 1998 to 2007, he was Director of Publishing Technologies for the National Academies Press, which makes more than 3700 books (more than 650,000 pages) from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council fully browsable and searchable online for free (http://www.nap.edu). This site receives more than 1.5 million visitors per month, and boasts of some of the most advanced search and discovery tools available on any publisher’s site, most of which were initially developed by Mr. Jensen.

Steve believes in the people, the process, and the tools of publishing. He has seen technology leverage the skills of capable people with speed and quality as never before in the history of the written word. Steve believes that we can use these tools to manage our work, clarify our communications, and produce great books with less heartache and stress. Steve’s been working in the publishing industry since the cutting edge of technology meant improving the rubylith and the red tape.

Biography coming soon.

Scott Karp is the co-founder and CEO of Publish2, a news aggregator powered by journalists. He is also the Editor & Publisher of Publishing 2.0, a blog about how technology is transforming media and publishing. Folio: magazine named Scott one of the 40 most influential people in publishing for 2007. Scott was previously the Director of Digital Strategy for Atlantic Media, publisher of The Atlantic.

Bob Kasher is Sales Director for MPS Mobile a new Mobile device based content delivery platform that makes print, music and video available to any Internet enabled mobile device anywhere in the world. He has been a pioneer in the world of digital content as one of the founders of /Database Directories/ an early digital publisher still operating profitably and successfully as well as many other positions in the publishing industry (some concurrent) from author to marketing director to publisher with a variety of companies including Prentice Hall, IDG, Talonbooks, NTC Books and General Publishing.

ROGER KASUNIC has been the Vice President of Editing, Design, and Production for McGraw-Hill’s Professional unit since 1995. He has recently initiated an offshoring program for scientific, technical, and medical books that includes both composition and editorial services. Roger is also actively involved in Web production, e-books, file archiving, and digital licensing. Prior to his service at McGraw-Hill, Roger worked in the commercial print industry and for various publishers including Academic Press, The Franklin Library, and Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Thomas Keith is the Production Manager and Art Director for New Directions Publishing Corporation, a post he has held since 2006. Since 1987 Thomas has been associated with New Directions, where he also works as an Editor, focusing chiefly on re-launches and the plays of Tennessee Williams. He earned his MFA from Ohio University.

• Sr. VP for US Operations, DNAML
• Author of 50+ technology books, including Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Internet and Search Engine Optimization for Dummies
• Founder, Top Floor Publishing
• Founder, e-business service provider BizBlast

George Kerscher Ph.D.

“in the Information Age, access to information is a fundamental human right” -UN 2001

He started innovations information technology by creating the first eBooks in 1987, and coined the term “print disabled. “He believes that properly designed information systems that use structured markup, such as XML, can make all information accessible to all people, and is pushing the evolving technologies in that direction.

Affiliations: Secretary General, DAISY Consortium, Co-chair, Steering Council of WAI, Senior Officer, RFB&D, Board of International Digital Publishing Forum, and serves on NIMAS.

Neeru Khosla is a firm believer in the power of education. She wants the rigor and accountability of for profit models to apply to non-profits. Neeru is a member of the Board at The Nueva School in Hillsborough, California, where she has served since 1997, caters to gifted and talented students and is internationally recognized. Neeru is also on the Advisory Board of the American India Foundation, a leading international development organization charged with accelerating social and economic change in India. She previously served as a trustee of the Pacific Vascular Research Foundation and Connexions, a Rice University open-source project. Neeru’s commitment to education is evidenced by her role on the National Advisory Board for DonorsChoose, an organization dedicated to addressing the scarcity and inequitable distribution of learning materials in U.S. public schools. Neeru is one of the founding members of the K-12 Initiative of the D-School (Hasso Plattner Institute of Design) at Stanford University and a member of the committee to expand the program. Neeru is currently the Co-Founder & Chairperson of CK12 Foundation. CK12 is a non-profit organization launched in 2006, which aims to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide.

Neeru holds a bachelor’s degree from Delhi University/San Jose State, a master’s degree in Molecular Biology from San Jose State, and a master’s in Education from Stanford University.

Shana Kimball is Publications Manger in the Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO) at the University of Michigan Library. As such, she serves as project lead on the digitalculturebooks project, a hybrid imprint of online and print books, published in partnership with the University of Michigan Press. She is also managing editor of the Journal of Electronic Publishing. Prior to joining SPO, she received an MA in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan.

Ivan Kirigin is the co-founder of tipjoy, a web service which makes it easy for people to leave tips for content they enjoy online. His expertise is in software engineering.

Abby Kirigin is the co-founder of tipjoy, a web service which makes it easy for people to leave tips for content they enjoy online. Her expertise is in user experience and interaction design.

Mr. Kreisa has been working in high tech for over 17 years and is now leading product marketing at Mark Logic. He is responsible for all aspects of product marketing for MarkLogic Server. Prior to Mark Logic he spent more than 6 years with Business Objects. There he led the corporate demo team and had product marketing responsibilities for several products including Web Intelligence, and the performance management products. Mr. Kreisa holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Texas.

Kassia Krozser is the founder and primary voice for Booksquare.com, a website focused on dissecting the publishing industry with love and skepticism. She is also a founding partner at Medialoper.com—same love and skepticism applied to all entertainment media. Her work on both sites frequently focuses on how new technology impacts traditional media. She is a reviewer for PaperbackReader.net and a regular contributor to other publications.

Biography coming soon.

Michelle Leder launched footnoted.org in August 2003 to coincide with the publication of her book, Financial Fine Print (John Wiley, 2003). The site looks at the things companies bury in their routine SEC filings and has been named one of the 50 best sites by Time Magazine and a site for “those in the know” by the WSJ.

Covering the digital revolution since 1982. Currently chief technology writer for Newsweek. Author of six books including Hackers, Artificial Life, Crypto, and The Perfect Thing.

Daniel N. Lewis is an entrepreneur and Vice President, Business Development and General Counsel of Wikia, Inc. Daniel co-founded ArmchairGM, a sports website, which Wikia, Inc. acquired in January 2007. Daniel is a former sports blogger and had several blogs of his own before the “blogosphere” truly existed. Prior to Wikia, Daniel was an associate in the Labor and Employment department at Epstein Becker & Green, P.C., in Manhattan and a freelance sports writer. Daniel earned his Juris Doctorate from Benjamin N.Cardozo School of Law, where he served as an Editor of the Cardozo Law Review. Daniel graduated from Tufts University in 2000 with a BA in Economics.

Brent is Director, Internet & Digital for Harlequin Enterprises Ltd., a leading publisher of women’s fiction and the world’s largest publisher of series romance. Brent leads the strategic development and operational execution of Harlequin’s digital publishing and marketing programs. This includes Harlequin’s own site featuring a robust community of readers, a leading and widely recognized ebook program, digital audio, mobile distribution, digital only content and leveraging Harlequin’s famous brand in the web 2.0 world.

Brent has over 16 years marketing experience within publishing covering trade, educational and children’s products. Brent has developed internet marketing and commerce solutions for over ten years including Harlequin’s ebook strategy and site development. He has worked in the U.S., Canadian and UK publishing markets.

Barry Libert is the Chairman of Mzinga (Swahili for “beehive”), a leading provider of business social media solutions to drive growth, innovation and learning. As the founder and CEO of one of Mzinga’s predecessor companies, Shared Insights, Libert was one of the first in the industry to recognize and promote the value of communities and Web 2.0 technologies in enabling enterprises to communicate and collaborate to make better decisions based on the experience of peers, experts and leading industry vendors. Libert’s previous experience includes positions with Arthur Andersen, John Hancock and McKinsey & Company. The co-author of “We Are Smarter Than Me,” he has written extensively on the value of information and relationships; his articles have appeared in Newsweek, Smart Money, Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He has also appeared on CNN, CNBC and NPR. He received a bachelor’s degree from Tufts University and an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School.

As president of Lightspeed, LLC, a management consulting practice in New York City, Jim Lichtenberg provides strategic counsel to clients in the fields of publishing, and information technology. A primary focus is the transformation of publishing due to the impact of new information technologies. He contributes regularly on these issues to Publishers Weekly, Publishing Research Quarterly, Publishing Trends and other journals, and is a frequent speaker at industry events sponsored by organizations such as The Frankfurt Book Fair, the Book Industry Study Group, and the American Library Association. From 2003-2006, he was a professor of Information Technology in the Executive Masters of Technology program at Polytechnic University in Manhattan.

Jamie Low has helped hundreds of organizations “get search” for over a decade.

The founder of consulting firm SearchEngineMarketing.com, he regularly guides virtual teams of marketing and technology professionals through the turbulent waters of creating and maintaining their own in-house search marketing initiatives.

A frequent speaker and trainer on the topic of “Search Engine Optimization”, he has also been a featured presenter at Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Strategies conference series, and has been quoted in publications such as Inc Magazine, Internet.com and the Wall Street Journal Online.

Bill McCoy is General Manager, Digital Publishing Business at Adobe Systems Incorporated, responsible for Adobe’s solutions for digital distribution and protection of commercially published works. Bill has been involved in the development of publishing and content delivery solutions for 20 years, including key roles in the development of Adobe’s PostScript and PDF technologies. Bill was founder and CEO of PictureIQ Corporation which created innovative solutions for digital imaging and dynamic content delivery, and began his career at Xerox Corporation.

Keith is the President of CoveritLive a web based software platform for ‘live blogging’. Launched in November, CoveritLive has been used around the world by journalists and bloggers to cover events in real time for their readers. It has been referred to as “Twitter on steroids”, “a tipping point in online education” and “a new form of reporting to empower citizen journalism”. Previously, Keith was the co-founder of Salesdriver.com in 1999 when ‘software as service’ was still a relatively new idea.

As Vice President and Creative Director at Dow Jones, Greg Merkle is responsible for overseeing the user experience design of the Content Technology Solutions within the Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group. With more than 20 years experience in the electronic publishing and information industry, Mr. Merkle Greg has both the big picture vision of where and how information is being used as well as the implementation expertise to bring goal and task oriented products and solutions to market.

Previously, he was Associate Vice President, Product Design at Factiva and was responsible for user experience design for all products and services of Factiva. This included working strategically with the Factiva product organization and customers to prototype business ideas and build innovative products and solutions to meet their needs. The design group disciplines include: Information Architecture, Market Validation, Interface/Interaction Design, Human Factors/Usability and Data visualization.

Prior to this appointment Mr. Merkle had the role of Creative Director/Product Design and headed the product and interface design team at Dow Jones where he introduced user focused design principles and usability prior the Internet revolution.

Mr. Merkle joined Dow Jones in 1993 as an Art Director. He later focused on User Interface Design with the release of: Personal Journal, Dow Jones News/Retrieval, Dow Vision, The Dow Jones Business Center on America Online, Dow Jones Publications Library and Dow Jones Interactive.

Prior to Dow Jones, Mr. Merkle was the principal of Greg Merkle Design specializing in corporate identity and graphic design for clients including: Dow Jones, MCA Records, Societe Generale and Schering Plough.

As director of content for HarvardBusiness.org, Paul Michelman oversees the site’s original content, including its growing blog network. He is the executive producer and host of the HBR IdeaCast, one of the world’s leading business podcasts, as is a frequent contributor to HarvardBusiness.org’s Conversation Starter blog. He was formerly director of programming and production for Captivate Network.

Mr. Miller’s responsibilities include management of the LibreDigital Division and NewsStand corporate business development. He has more than 17 years experience in strategic product development and marketing in the hi-tech sector, including seven years in business development management for Internet-based technology companies. A proven builder and leader of dynamic teams, his strengths include creating technology solutions for new channels and applications, concept-to-sale product management and contract sales and negotiations.

Prior to NewsStand, Craig was U.S. Director of Marketing and Business Development for Munich-based DynaPel, which focused on advancing motion enabled MPEG4 CODECs in the security, video and graphics industry. He served as the Head of Engineering for STB’s Specialized Technology Division, creating multi-port graphics cards and video decoders including the TV Guide Channel’s broadcast-quality MPEG2 board. Craig also served as Analog Device’s Graphics Products Marketing Manager, and was a key member of Compaq’s Strategic Technology Development engineering team.

Craig holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the Milwaukee School of Engineering and an M.B.A. from the University of Houston Executive Program.

Dan has a deep faith that Internet tools can be harnessed to deliver transparency to the process of managing complex projects. Dan believes that we can manage the flow of critical information so that Craftspeople can exercise their craft, Managers can leverage their experience, and Executives can direct and lead. And everyone can get more sleep. Dan has spent more than a decade writing sophisticated software to make people’s lives simpler. Dan obtained his B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University, where he received both the Stanley Award for Excellence in Mathematics and the Wallace Award for Creative Writing.

Andrew Weinstein joined Ingram Digital Ventures, a predecessor company to IDG, in September 2005. Previously, Mr. Weinstein spent 5-years at Lightning Source Inc., most recently as Vice President of Channel and Publisher Development. In that role he had responsibility for all aspects of Lightning Source’s eBook business. In addition, he managed the business development and operational relationships for Lightning Source’s key print on demand distribution customers, including Amazon, B&N, Ingram Book Group, NACSCORP and Baker & Taylor.

Mr. Weinstein came to Lightning Source through the acquisition of the company he co-founded JNMedia, Inc., a leading developer of publishing technology. JNMedia, Inc.’s EPODIUM technology, Electronic Publishing On Demand In Unlimited Media, helped publishers create a platform to multi-purpose book content for print, electronic, and online/offline marketing uses.

Before co-founding JNMedia, Inc., Mr. Weinstein was an Associate Director at BMG Direct, the world’s largest direct mail music club, where he managed the financial/marketing analytical group. In this capacity, he developed many of the analytical models used to evaluate the music club membership’s purchasing trends and to forecast their contribution to the business more accurately. In addition, he actively contributed to and managed the development, measurement, and deployment of all new online initiatives.

Mr. Weinstein received his B.A. in Economics from Brandeis University and his M.B.A. in Finance and Marketing from New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business.

Sara Nelson became editor in chief of Publishers Weekly in January 2005, straight from a stint as the Book Beat columnist for the New York Post. A journalist for twenty five years, Nelson had previously written a publishing column for the New York Observer and reviewed for publications from Glamour magazine to the Chicago Tribune. She was one of the founding editors of Inside.com. Her freelance pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many national magazines.

Maud Newton blogs about books, culture, politics, and whatever is running through her mind on any given day, at MaudNewton.com. She has written for The American Prospect, the New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and Newsday. Her essays appear in various anthologies, including What We Do Now and When I was a Loser (out from Free Press in March 2007). She lives in Brooklyn and is working on a novel set in Miami, her hometown.

Bestselling chick-lit novelist and recent graduate of the Online MA in Creative Writing & New Media (http://www.creativewritingandnewmedia.com). Alison is working to cross-publish contemporary fiction online and due to commence a PhD at the Institute of Creative Technologies (http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk) at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O’Reilly Media also publishes online through the O’Reilly Network and hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and the Web 2.0 Conference. Tim’s blog, the O’Reilly Radar “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is on the boards of MySQL, CollabNet, Safari Books Online, Wesabe, and ValuesOfN, and is a partner in O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

A publishing veteran with 25 years of consulting, management and operational experience, Mr. O’Leary is founder and principal of Magellan Consulting Partners, whose clients include major media firms as well as smaller and not-for-profit entities with significant publishing and media commitments.

The firm’s practice areas include operational improvement, revenue development, market analysis and business planning. Work done by the firm most often results in both immediate and mid-term changes in processes, structures and in some cases technologies used to produce client content. For Magellan clients, Mr. O’Leary has also written several business plans to guide start-up and growth opportunities.

Prior to starting Magellan Media, Mr. O’Leary served as senior VP and associate publisher with Hammond Inc., an internationally recognized geographic reference publisher. Responsible for editorial content, database development, production and operations, Mr. O’Leary restructured editorial operations to benefit from the firm’s prior technology investments. He also substantially increased the pace of the company’s new-product development efforts.

Before Hammond, Mr. O’Leary directed operations at several of Time Inc.’s weekly magazines and was part of the team that launched Entertainment Weekly. He joined the firm in 1983, after earning an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. Mr. O’Leary also holds an A.B. in chemistry from Harvard College.

Murugan Pal a serial entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, Bay Area, USA. Murugan is currently the Co-Founder & President of CK12 Foundation. CK12 is a non-profit organization launched in 2006, that aims to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide. Prior to CK12, Murugan had a brief tenure with Foundation Capital as Entrepreneur-In-Residence. Previously, Murugan was the founder and CTO of SpikeSource. Before founding SpikeSource, Pal was an entrepreneur-in-residence with venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. Previously, he was a Founding Engineer of e-business software company Asera, Inc. Before Asera, Pal was a principal developer at Oracle Corporation in the Application Server division and was part of the company’s early XML initiatives. Prior to Oracle, he was one of the lead developers of Versant Corporation’s Object Database. Pal has worked on real-time enterprise technologies, composite applications, service-oriented architecture runtimes, relational databases, object databases, and robotics and manufacturing automation.

Pal holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Thiagarajar College of Engineering, affiliated to Madurai University in India, a Master’s in Industrial Engineering from Arizona State University, a Master’s in Computer Science from Arizona State University, and was a Doctoral Candidate in Industrial Engineering at Arizona State University.

Philip Parker holds the INSEAD Chair Professorship of Management Science. He is also the founder of ICON Group International, Inc. which uses computer automation to author non-fiction titles distributed electronically and POD. The patented technology is language and format independent and has thus far created some 250,000 titles across various genres (business, health, and education) and formats (books, PC games, videos and mobile phone software). ICON Group is currently establishing a technology transfer initiative, under the name EdgeMaven Media.

Phil received his Ph.D. in Business Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at Harvard University, MIT, Stanford University, UC San Diego and UCLA. His patent and research in publishing were recently featured in BusinessWeek, Handelsblatt, the Guardian, and the Annals of Improbable Research, among others.

Biography coming soon.

Steve Paxhia is the Lead Analyst for the Gilbane Group Publishing Practice.. He assists publishing technology companies in turning their newest ideas into profitable businesses and helps publishers assess their strategy and current performance in a cross media publishing environment and then helping to accelerate their growth. In the past ten years, Steve has worked with more than 30 companies by helping refine their strategic plans. Before joining the Gilbane Group, Steve spent 20 years imanagemnet positions at Macmillan and Houghton Mifflin, served as CEO of Inso Corporation, founded several successful consulting practices and served as Chairman of Rovia – A start-up that developed secure fully featured e-books for the college market. Steve has considerable experience with custom publishing, licensing of intellectual property, electronic publishing work flow and technology, and EDI. He was the founder of the publishing industry’s Pubnet e-commerce and information system.

Derek Powazek is a specialist in the rich middle ground between digital community and traditional publishing. His groundbreaking work in bringing web communities into printed magazines resulted in Folio naming him one of the Top 40 Industry Influencers of 2007. In addition to advising a number of startups and editing Fray: The Quarterly of True Stories, he’s now the CEO of Pixish, a new venture that aims to connect creatives and publishers. Derek lives in San Francisco with his wife, two nutty Chihuahuas, a grumpy cat, and a house full of plants named Fred.

Bob Pritchett is the President/CEO of Logos Bible Software, an electronic publisher of reference and scholarly works. Logos offers more than 7,000 titles from 130 publishers to half a million users worldwide. Bob is a 2005 winner of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award and the author of Fire Someone Today, And Other Surprising Tactics for Making Your Business a Success.

At the forefront of “publishing technology” for over a decade, Sol Rosenberg is a leading expert at digital publishing & marketing strategies for global publishers.

Mr. Rosenberg leads the USA Publishing Solutions group for Value Chain International, a global provider of Digital Publishing Solutions, helping major publishers like McGraw-Hill, Cengage Learning, Taylor & Francis, and many others.

Bill Rosenblatt is president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies (www.giantstepsmts.com), a consulting firm whose clients include content providers and digital media technology companies. Bill bridges the gaps between business and technology in the digital media world. He brings content providers expertise in areas such as digital rights management, content management and distribution, cross-media strategy, and digital product strategy, and he provides technology vendors with market strategy, business development, and product management services.

Bill is the managing editor of the Jupitermedia newsletter DRM Watch (www.drmwatch.com) and author of the book Digital Rights Management: Business and Technology (John Wiley & Sons, 2001).

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 also one of the architects of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), a standard for online intellectual property identification.

In addition to Digital Rights Management: Business and Technology, Bill is an author of technical books for the publisher O’Reilly & Associates, which have been translated into French and Japanese, and he was a contributor to the book Electronic Publishing Strategies (Pira International, 1997). He has written articles on digital media for various periodicals, spoken at conferences worldwide, including the World Economic Forum in Davos, and has been quoted in The New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Der Spiegel, Australian Financial Review, Electronic Times (South Korea), Billboard, PC World, Editor & Publisher, and other publications. He has lectured on DRM, digital copyright, and media technology at several universities and law schools.

Bill has a B.S.E. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton, an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, and executive education from Harvard and University of Southern California business schools.

I write the E-Book Report blog for Publishers Weekly and am editor-publisher of TeleRead.org. I’m also author of The Silicon Jungle (Ballantine), The Complete Laptop Computer Guide (St. Martin’s), and four other books.

Among my interests are e-libraries, e-book devices and related hardware such as OLPC’s sharp-screened XO-1, copyright, business models for E, digital divide issues, the DRM debate, and format standards. I consider both traditional DRM and the Tower of eBabel, as I’ve dubbed it, to be lit- and sales-toxins in most cases. One possible DRM-related compromise might be social DRM.

I’ve been writing about e-books since the early 1990s and am the author of the TeleRead chapter of Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier (MIT/ASIS), where I call for a well-stocked national digital library system carefully integrated with schools and libraries—-and the popularization of book-friendly hardware. TeleRead-related articles have also appeared in the Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report , among other places.

Winner of the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values. He sees “media” as the landscape where this interaction takes place, and “literacy” as the ability to participate consciously in it.

His ten best-selling books on new media and popular culture have been translated to over thirty languages. They include Cyberia, Media Virus, Playing the Future, Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism, and Coercion, winner of the Marshall Mcluhan Award for best media book. Rushkoff also wrote the acclaimed novels Ecstasy Club and Exit Strategy and graphic novel, Club Zero-G. He has just finished a book for HarperBusiness, applying renaissance principles to today’s complex economic landscape, Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out. He’s now writing a monthly comic book for Vertigo called Testament.

Mark Sarvas’s debut novel, HARRY, REVISED, will be published by Bloomsbury in May 2008. He is best known as the host of the popular and controversial literary weblog “The Elegant Variation” which has been covered by The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Guardian (A Top 10 Literary Blog), Forbes Magazine (Best of the Web), Los Angeles Magazine (A Top L.A. Blog), The Scotsman, Salon, the Christian Science Monitor, Slate, The Denver Post, The Village Voice, The New York Sun, NPR and numerous other fine publications. His book reviews and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Threepenny Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Truthdig, The Modern Word, Boldtype and the Los Angeles Review, and he is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Biography coming soon.

Lokesh Seth oversees the product management and engineering groups at Connotate. He is responsible for formulating and delivering on our product strategy.

Prior to joining Connotate, he was the CTO of ServiceWare, responsible for developing and driving the firm’s technology vision. He led the product and development teams and guided the company through a successful IPO. He also oversaw the identification of strategic M&A opportunities and completed a successful merger with Kanisa.

Mr. Seth was previously with Covansys where he led various project teams in advising Fortune 500 clients on their strategic technology plans and the building and implementation of IT solutions. Prior to that, he was the owner of a consulting firm that built custom applications for educational institutions.

He holds a Bachelor of Technology degree in computer science engineering from India and a MBA from Miami University.

Mike Shatzkin is Founder & CEO of The Idea Logical Company. In his more than 40 years in publishing, he has played almost all the roles: bookstore clerk, author, agent, production director, sales and marketing director, and, for the past 30 years, consultant. His client list has included most of the major publishers in the United States and many outside the US, as well as a variety of publisher suppliers and trading partners, particularly in the new technology area.

Since co-organizing the first “Electronic Publishing and Rights” Conference sponsored by PW in the early 1990s, Mike has been speaking and writing about digital change. He was co-chair of VISTA’s “Publishing in the 21st Century” Program, producing White Papers and conferences on the impact of technology on publishers throughout the 1990s. He also organized Frankfurt’s “Big Questions” conference in 2001 and last year’s research – again resulting in a White Paper and conferences in New York and London – on “Digital Asset Distribution” sponsored by Klopotek.

This year, Mike is spearheading a similar effort with the Book Industry Study Group, looking at the extent of experimentation and innovation in publishing.

Kathy Sierra worked as a game programmer, interaction designer, and learning specialist (Sun Microsystems, UCLA Extension) before creating the best-selling Head First series for O’Reilly. She was the original creator of one of the largest software developer communities, javaranch.com, and the author of a Technorati Top 100 blog, “Creating Passionate Users.”

Founder of LibraryThing (LibraryThing.com), a social network for book lovers.

Christopher Stein receive