Candidate Statement - Hervé Essa

The Readium foundation was the missing part to complete the digital book industry standard.

It is the first step to provide new reading solution and new reading experience to the Publishing market.

Jouve is a well-established publishing services provider in US and Europe that has become the global leader in ebook and digital production. The company designs, promotes and distributes content in a variety of paper and digital formats. Our focus on continuous innovation and our solid international presence allow us to stay ahead of technology trends and new digital usage patterns to offer value-added solutions to publishing industry players and large organizations.

For years Jouve has been investing in Digital. We have become the largest conversion partner with other 150,000 books converted per year to ePub format. Through those investments Jouve has widely contributed to the development and promotion of the ePub standard, working closely with the different players of the value chain as well as with the European commission.

Jouve is continuously investing in Digital and promoting standard to the industry. The recent years were focused in providing to the Publishing market a new set of tools and technology to provide a “end-to-end” solution, from production to distribution.

We are proud to have already joined and invested into the Readium consortium by providing engineers who are contributing to the current development. Readium has become part of our core service offering. Our “Readium” solution has already become “the” Digital School Book platform for a French education Publisher.

One of my main motivation as board member will be to carry on my current work of promoting to Publishers as well as to the European community and other markets the Readium Consortium.

All efforts are to provide visibility and to promote Readium as “standard” to the Publishing market as well as European institutions, commission and other industries that have a need to distribute content digitally (e.g. automotive industry).

I have over 15 years of experience in digital technology and services on different industries. I have actively participating to the shift from “On the shelf” software to Open Source solution. For over 5 years I have promoted open source software that gathered large industrial organization to the benefit of use of Open Source Software.

For the past 8 years at Jouve, I have personally promoted digital solution to the US and European Publishers.

My presence in the Board as representative of one of the major EU associations would also provide Readium Foundation a strong support in the European market to achieve its goals, thanks to consolidated relations with the most relevant European institutions and government and a long lasting knowledge of the European publishing market and its technology.