Candidate Statement - Laurent Le Meur

Readium is a great industry initiative.

The breadth and depth of work done by volunteers under the Readium banner is nothing short of amazing. Team dedication to facilitate shared solutions among industry partners and come together to progress on the technology side is a great illustration of the power of people of good intentions, even when they’re competitors.

EDRLab has been supporting Readium since it was created, in 2015.

Our technical efforts started with a participation to the maintenance of the Readium SDK. In 2016, after the Readium community discussed at length the limitations of the SDK, we took the lead on the development of “Readium 2”, i.e. a set of toolkits optimized for different platforms and based on a consistent modular architecture.

Since then, EDRLab has dedicated a large part of its yearly budget to the development of Readium Mobile iOS, Readium Mobile Android and Readium Desktop. Today, more than 25 apps are already based on these toolkits. We’re now engaged with other Readium members in the development of Readium Web, which should be able to replace the original Readium-JS before 2020 ends.

EDRLab is promoting “media equality” for Readium.

The original goal of the Readium project was to ease the development of interoperable EPUB 3 reading systems via the release of an open-source codebase.

We are now promoting the idea that the Readium toolkits have to provide support for different content formats, some text, some audio and some image oriented. Audiobooks and Digital Visual Narratives are now first-class citizens in the Readium world.

EDRLab is also promoting support for W3C Publishing standards in Readium.

EDRLab is member of the W3C and participates to the work of the W3C Publishing WG (and soon W3C EPUB WG).

We consider that the new W3C Audiobooks standard has to be supported as an input format by the different Readium toolkits. This is already the case for Readium Desktop (and Thorium Reader published by EDRLab).

EDRLab is managing Readium LCP

Readium LCP is of major importance for the growth of an interoperable and easy to use ebook, Audiobook and Comics/Manga/BandeDessinée ecosystem.

EDRLab has seized this complex project in 2016 and has succeeded in developing an offer which is appealing for most public, private and national libraries, booksellers, technology providers and publishers. Many developers adopt the Readium codebase to easy their LCP implementation.

The Readium Foundation needs a clear goverance

We believe that the new board of the Readium Foundation must strengthen the Foundation around its core mission, i.e. the management of the Readium Intellectual Property and the provision of tools for Readium developers.

The new RF board must also take action to attract new members around this core mission, especially Readium users from low income countries.

This will require rapid changes in the way the Foundation uses its budget and in its membership due structure.

Biography Laurent Le Meur

Laurent LE MEUR is the Technical Director of EDRLab since its creation in 2015.

Previously, Laurent was project director at AlloCiné (entertainment), then UniversCiné (VoD), where he led several important Web projects. And before that, R&D Lead at the Agence France Presse, chairman of the IPTC News Architecture Working Party and editor of the NewsML-G2 news exchange standard.