Board Elections - June 2023

There are three candidates (for three seats) for a position at the Readium Foundation Board of Directors:

Kate Davey (BiblioVault)

Dear Readium members,

I’m general manager of BiblioVault, a non-profit file warehouse/delivery service/fulfillment center for scholarly books, based at the University of Chicago Press, as part of Chicago Distribution Services. Before joining BiblioVault, I was a technical manager at a division of Thomson Learning and for Harcourt Higher Ed.

Launched with grants from the Mellon Foundation, for the past 20 years BiblioVault (https://bibliovault.org) has helped more than 100 university and academic publishers

  • inventory their electronic resources,
  • make their print books into ebooks,
  • move files and metadata to ebookstores and printers worldwide,
  • fulfill directly to customers online, with implementations of Adobe Content Server, Readium-JS, and Readium LCP, and
  • meet new ebook challenges.

I’m a believer in shared solutions, the energy of Readium’s contributors, and the power of sustained steady effort.

Best regards,
Kate Davey

Risa Wolf (NYPL)

Dear Readium members,

I submit myself for consideration for re-election to the Readium Foundation board. As an avid e-reader and advocate for accessibility within all reading spaces, I would like to continue with the board and extend the Readium Organization’s visibility within reading technology communities.

As the Sr. Digital Product Manager for E-Reading at The New York Public Library, I recognize that technologists within this space have dual responsibilities - protecting the people who use our products, and providing an accessible experience to all. Our team at NYPL has been working to ensure that the nature of accessibility is expanded, and I have been delighted to ensure that the great accessible experience at Readium continues to be a cornerstone of our work.

I have spent the past three years working with both the board members and a number of participants within the e-reading community. I hope to continue these relationships and support the Board in communication with a larger audience.

Best regards,
Risa Wolf

Laurent Le Meur (EDRLab)

Dear Readium members,

I’m the Director of the European Digital Reading Lab, a membership and non-profit organization dedicated to open standards, open-source and accessibility in the digital book sector. We joined the Readium Foundation in 2015 and started the developement of the new generation of Readium software, now called Readium toolkits (for Swift and Kotlin), which replaced with great success the original Readium SDK written in C. We also developed the Readium Desktop toolkit, on which our Thorium Reader application is based, and we took on the development on the open-source Readium LCP Server and associated tools. We are also financing developer support for the Readium toolkits, which is carried out by their core developers.

I strongly believe that the book sector plays an essential role in fostering freedom of expression, and that open-source software is key to a fair competition in the book market, guarantees consumer choice and cultural diversity, helps reaching a good level of interoperability of e-books across devices and is the best way to reach a high level of accessibility for people with reading disabilities.

The Readium toolkits and Readium LCP are mightly tools for achieving this goals, that’s why EDRLab is willing to continue investing in this effort for the coming years.

Best regards,
Laurent Le Meur