Candidate Statement - Bill McCoy

I have served on the Board of Readium Foundation since its inception in 2013. Having been elected President by the Board, I have overseen day-to-day administrative and management activities on behalf of the Foundation.

I am running for re-election because I believe the Readium initiative is at a critical juncture and, if the members so desire, I would like to continue to contribute as a Board member for a final term according to our term limits. Readium SDK and Readium JS are used in many commercial reading systems, and Readium for Chrome has become an important reference system for the publishing industry as well as a testbed for new features in EPUB. Now we are launching new vendor-independent DRM (Readium LCP – Licensed Content Protection) and developing a new more modular software base (“Readium 2”). And with EPUB development having moved into W3C, and new work happening there on Web Publications for the Open Web Platform, it’s even more important to have an independent open source collective to help ensure the real-world interoperability and usability of EPUB and publishing technology for the Web.

My perspective is that Readium needs to evolve into a more traditional open source initiative (moving away from software licensing as a revenue source) so if re-elected I would focus on fund-raising and building the community of voluntary contributors and adopters to facilitate that transformation and enabling potentially expanding the activities under our umbrella.

Effective February, 2017 I became the Publishing Champion at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is not presently an organization member of Readium Foundation. I was previously Executive Director of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), which recently merged with W3C. I have permission of W3C and the current Readium Board to continue to serve should I be re-elected. However, I would not formally represent W3C or its interests but rather endeavor to take the perspective of publishing community needs as a whole as an independent Board member.