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BISG Committees
Digital Standards Committee
Click
here to view a list of participating
companies.
BISG is pleased to announce
the formation of a new Digital Standards Committee. The purpose
of the committee is to develop – with input from all relevant
constituencies – industry-wide standards for the online discovery,
browsing, search and distribution of books and related content in
digital form.
The BISG Digital Standards
Committee will begin work in July 2007. All BISG members are invited to
participate.
What’s next?
Repositories of content –
like those featured during BISG’s recent
Making
Information Pay 2007 – have already been established by
publishers, booksellers, search engines, and wholesalers, and many more
are planned. With demand for digital content growing as these
repositories develop, companies in all sectors of the book business see
new opportunities for promoting, marketing and selling content online.
Managing these opportunities
poses challenges for all parties in the supply chain. Searching,
discovering and delivering book content is not as easy, consistent and
affordable as it could be. A multiplicity of rules and interfaces, many
of them proprietary, make it hard to exchange content simply and
cost-effectively, and the lack of widely accepted standards make
distributing digital content unnecessarily complex and inefficient.
The BISG Digital Standards
Committee – which will include experts from all parts of the U.S.
and international book industries – will address these challenges by
developing open, consensus-based standards that will facilitate online
book content being searched, browsed and distributed more easily and
effectively.
The committee will work to
find solutions that will benefit the entire book industry – publishers,
retailers, search engines, authors, wholesalers and distributors – by
improving the process by which online book content reaches consumers.
To expedite standards
development at a time when the book industry is moving rapidly forward,
the Committee will start its work using a briefing paper, requirements,
and draft specification that were developed within the Association of
American Publishers (AAP) to serve as frameworks for further work.
Anyone interested in joining
the BISG Digital Standards Committee should contact Michael
Healy, Executive Director, by e-mailing
michael@bisg.org. As with
all BISG committees and working groups, participation in the Digital
Standards Committee is open only to those who are members of BISG.
Digital Standards Committee Chair
Kent Freeman
Chief Technology Officer
Ingram Digital Group
digitalstandards_chair@bisg.org
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