Ebook Pricing

Hugh McGuire is the co-founder of BookOven.com, a cloud-based book/ebook publishing tool for small presses and independent writers, editors, proofreaders and designers.

He is the founder of LibriVox.org, a maker of free volunteer-read public domain audiobooks, and once called “perhaps the most interesting collaborative cultural project this side of Wikipedia.” LibriVox is one of the world’s most prolific audiobook publishers, with a catalog of some 2,500+ works in 29 languages, and runs on a budget of $0.

He writes about books, publishing, open content, and the power the digital medium has put into the hands of creators for Huffington Post and the Book Oven Blog.

He is a former engineer and developer of environmental financial products, a Montrealer, an Advisor to SpokenWord.org, past-president of the Board of the Atwater Library and Computer Centre, the last remaining Mechanics Institute in Canada.

Neelan Choksi is the CEO of Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza. With over 2.0 million users in over 60 countries and over 12 million eBooks downloaded, Stanza is the most popular eBook reader for the iPhone and IPod Touch.

Lexcycle was acquired by Amazon in April. Prior to joining Lexcycle, Neelan was the COO at SpringSource (recently acquired by VMWare), the company behind the popular open source Spring Framework. Neelan served as the co-founder and President at SolarMetric, a leading object relational mapping provider, which was acquired by BEA Systems in 2005. Neelan also worked for TechTrader, Andersen Consulting Strategic Services and Exxon Research and Engineering. He currently serves on the board of Tasktop Technologies. Neelan is a graduate of MIT (and was part of the often-publicized MIT Blackjack team), Stevens Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business.

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Scribd is a social publishing site where people upload and share creative writing and various documents, regardless of file format. The company claims more than 55 million unique users to the network each month and well-known users such as Barack Obama, the World Economic Forum, major publishers and New York Times-bestselling authors.

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Michael Tamblyn, VP Content, Sales & Merchandising for Shortcovers, works at the intersection of culture, trade, and technology. From a start in independent bookselling as a magazine and small press buyer, in 1996 he co-founded Bookshelf.ca, one of Canada’s first online bookstores, in partnership with Bell Sympatico. Indigo Books & Music purchased Bookshelf.ca in 1998, and Michael moved to the chain as vice-president of online operations. He later consulted in technology and media sectors before becoming the founding CEO of BookNet Canada in March of 2003. During his tenure, BookNet Canada launched B2B trading networks serving hundreds of bookstores and publishers, created standards, certification programs and software, and launched BNC SalesData, the national book sales tracking service. At Shortcovers, he is responsible for sales, publisher and industry relations, content acquisition, and the merchandising experience across all of Shortcovers’ web and mobile services. He is also a Director of the New York-based Book Industry Study Group and an Adjunct Professor for the Masters of Publishing program at Simon Fraser University.

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Joe Wikert is a publishing executive with 20+ years of industry experience. He is General Manager & Publisher at O’Reilly Media, Inc., where he manages the sales and editorial groups. Prior to joining O’Reilly he was a Vice President and Executive Publisher in the Professional/Trade division of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and had management responsibility for the WROX and Sybex imprints. Since graduating from Purdue University with a degree in management and computer science, Joe has held a variety of sales and editorial positions in the publishing industry. He is also the author of seven books on programming languages and computer applications. Joe regularly shares his publishing industry thoughts and outlook on his Publishing 2020 blog which can be found at www.JoeWikert.com as the proud owner of an Amazon Kindle, Joe also blogs about his e-book reader experience on www.Kindleville.com.

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