You Are Here: Home  /  About

About

• Introduction 
• EDItEUR's scope and mission
  
• EDItEUR's standards
• Membership 
• Governance 
• Participation
• Report from Executive Director to Members
  
• Newsletters
• Events
• Who we are 
• EDItEUR's consultants
  

Introduction
EDItEUR is the international group coordinating development of the standards infrastructure for electronic commerce in the book and serials sectors. EDItEUR provides its membership with research, standards and guidance in such diverse areas as:

• EDI and other e-commerce standards for book and serial transactions
• Bibliographic and product information
• The standards infrastructure for digital publishing
• Rights management and trading
• Radio frequency identification tags

Established in 1991, EDItEUR is a truly international organisation with 90 members from 17 countries, including Australia, Canada, Japan, South Africa, United States and most of the European countries.

A leader in global standards for the exchange of bibliographic information and of e-commerce messages in the book and journal supply chains, EDItEUR is now engaged in shaping key national and international projects aimed at developing rights and permissions expressions.

As the digital media landscape converges EDItEUR will continue to monitor developments in other sectors seeking out, on behalf of its stakeholders, opportunities for collaboration with other industries and standards organisations that will help its members not only to keep pace with change but to influence the future. 

top of page 

EDItEUR's scope and mission 
We work globally on behalf of:

• Book and journal publishers, of all sizes and in all sectors
• Book wholesalers and retailers
• Subscription agents and other intermediaries in the library supply chain
• Online content aggregators
• Libraries (national, academic, special, public) and library consortia
• Rights management organisations in these sectors
• Systems vendors supplying any of these sectors
• Other national and international standards organisations operating in the same or contiguous sectors
• Trade associations representing any of these groups, at global, regional or national level

Our role is:

• To identify, specify, develop, publish, and maintain our own messaging standards in support of ecommerce within our sectors, where a requirement for standards is identified anywhere within our stakeholder community

• To promote the implementation both of our own standards and of other appropriate standards within our stakeholder community, including through the creation of a global network of organisations collaborating to facilitate the implementation of standards

• To liaise and engage with other standards bodies, both within our sector and in contiguous media sectors, to ensure the closest possible collaboration in standards development, promotion and deployment – avoidance of duplication and waste, mutual learning

• To provide a secretariat and management service for other standards organisations, and to seek other ways of supporting other standards organisations where this may be appropriate

• To engage in projects which support our other objective

• To provide a centre of standards expertise for our stakeholder community, including a service to monitor, report from and coordinate with other organisations that are developing related standards that are important to our stakeholders.

We encourage the greatest possible participation of our stakeholders and our membership in decision making processes, particularly in the establishment of strategy and priorities and the approval of our specifications.

top of page 

EDItEUR's standards
EDItEUR has developed a number of key standards that are already internationally  used within the books and serials supply chains to facilitate e-commerce, enable the transmission of rich metadata records, and that use existing identifiers. Wide implementation of any current or future EDItEUR standard is positively welcomed and we allow any of our standards to be used free of charge by any organisation with an interest in the areas that we cover.  Although we do not charge any fees, we make our standards available to you under licence. By downloading, importing, copying, abstracting from, modifying, circulating or implementing any of the EDItEUR Standards you agree to abide by the terms of our licence. For the full text of our licence, click here.

 top of page  

Membership
Membership of EDItEUR is open to all organisations with an interest in e-commerce in the book and serials supply chain and related identification standards. Its current membership reflects the diversity of this community and includes national libraries, metadata aggregators, book retailers and wholesalers, subscription agents, national standards organisations, and systems vendors. Find out more

top of page 

Governance 

The members of EDItEUR's Board are:

• Jens Bammel (International Publishers' Association) 
• Philippe Beauvillard (Le Cercle de la Librairie)
• Mark Bide (EDItEUR)
  
• Peter Kilborn (Book Industry Communication)
  
• Paola Mazzucchi (Associazione Italiana Editori) 
• Ronald Schild (Marketing- und Verlagsservice des Buchhandels GmbH)
• Eefke Smit (International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers and Federation of European Publishers)
• Julian Sowa (International ISBN Agency)
• Neil Wilson (British Library)
• Mark Majurey (Publishers' Licensing Society)
  

In the review of EDItEUR that is now beginning, the Board and the executive management of EDItEUR will seek to answer some key questions about the future of the organisation, including:

• What are the appropriate areas of work in which EDItEUR should operate?
• How should EDItEUR be governed at a strategic level going forward?
• How should EDItEUR processes be governed?
• How should EDItEUR be financed?
• What should EDItEUR's immediate priorities be?

We anticipate resolving these questions during 2009, to provide us with a firm platform on which to build for the next decade.

 top of page

Participation
EDItEUR's members contribute significantly to its future strategic direction and development plans. There are a number of major committees and working groups including:

• ONIX for Books International Steering Committee
• National user groups for ONIX for Books
• NISO/EDItEUR ONIX-PL Working Group
• ICEDIS committee

Minutes of the Open Meeting 21 April 2009


Minutes of the Open Meeting 14 October 2009

Go to the ICEDIS website

top of page 

Report from Executive Director to Members

Mark Bide has been Executive Director of EDItEUR since January 2009. His Executive Director's report is based on that issued for the Board and Management Committee for the Frankfurt BookFair in October 2009. Although primarily of interest to current EDItEUR members, we are making it publicly available here.  

top of page  

Newsletters

EDItEUR regularly produces newsletters including updates about current projects and news of related standards and other developments that are of interest to members. Our most recent newsletters are available below. To sign up to receive newsletters as they are distributed, please let us know via the Contact form. 

July 2010 newsletter

April 2010 newsletter

February 2010 newsletter

November 2009 newsletter

September 2009 newsletter

June 2009 newsletter

February 2009 newsletter

top of page

Events
EDItEUR hosts events and meetings for members at both the Frankfurt and London Book Fairs.

Find out about forthcoming events

 top of page

Who we are

Mark Bide, Executive Director, EDItEUR
Appointed as Executive Director in 2009, Mark is also the Project Director for the ACAP Project, and a Director of Rightscom, the specialist media consultancy. He has worked in and around the publishing industry for nearly 40 years, having been a Director of the European subsidiaries of both CBS Publishing and John Wiley & Sons. He is a Visiting Professor of the University of the Arts London.

Brian Green, Executive Director, International ISBN Agency 
Until the beginning of 2009 Brian was also Executive Director of EDItEUR.  Brian managed BIC, the UK book trade standards body, from 1991 until 2006 and, prior to that was Director of Technology and Publishing Management at the UK Publishers Association after working in the publishing industry for many years. Brian was Chair of ISO TC46 SC9, the ISO committee responsible for identifiers in the information community, from 2003 until 2008.

Stella Griffiths, Associate Director, EDItEUR and International ISBN Agency
Stella has worked in publishing and international standards related roles since 1989. She has held senior managerial positions in both the book and serials sectors for over 15 years including roles at Wiley-Blackwell and Oxford University Press spanning production, digital publications development and strategy, subscriptions fulfilment and marketing. At Nielsen BookData she was Senior Manager of the UK ISBN Agency where she was a lead contributor in the ISO revision of the ISBN standard and the transition to the 13-digit ISBN.

Graham Bell, Chief Data Architect, EDItEUR
Graham will focus initially on the continuing development of ONIX for Books, and later on other EDItEUR standards for both the book and serials sectors.  Graham previously worked for HarperCollins Publishers in the UK and was most recently Head of Publishing Systems there, where he led the development of bibliographic and digital asset management systems, and was involved with the launches of many recent HarperCollins digital initiatives including e-audio, e-books and print-on-demand titles. He has over a decade of experience with ONIX for Books. Prior to HarperCollins, he worked as an editor and in IT roles within the magazine industry with Redwood Publishing.

Sarah Hilderley, Accessibility Project Lead, EDItEUR
Sarah has worked in publishing for many years, most recently as Production Director at HarperCollins Publishers. Her work there included the creation of standard ‘prelims’ which look at social responsibility and ethical sourcing of a publisher’s third party suppliers. She is taking the lead in EDItEUR’s involvement in Enabling Technologies Framework - a project funded by WIPO. This three year global project will develop a worldwide standard of best practice for publishers helping them ensure full accessibility to their digital material for the reading disabled.

 top of page 

EDItEUR's consultants

In developing the standards and messaging format requirements that our members identify as priorities to support their supply chain, e-commerce and identification needs, EDItEUR uses freelance consultants who are renowned specialists in their particular fields and have a close understanding of recent and expected future trends. This ensures not only that dedicated specialist resource will be available but also that the developed standards reflect a real understanding of the needs and issues our members face.

Francis Cave is a publishing technology expert specialising in the use of XML in publishing, both in production and supply chain communications. Since 1999 he has provided EDItEUR with much of the expertise needed to develop and maintain specifications and tools in support of the growing range of XML-based supply chain communication standards under the ONIX and EDItX brands. Aside from work for EDItEUR, he is in demand as a publishing technology consultant and training course presenter. Since early 2007 he has been Technical Project Manager for the ACAP project. He chairs BSI Technical Committee IST/41, which is concerned with international standardization of XML-based schema languages, topic map technologies and office application file formats (ODF and OOXML).

Paul Chartier has worked in the field of standardisation since 1971, first with W H Smith and, since 1980, as Principal of Praxis Consultants. He has been involved as Technical Editor or co-Editor of the original ISBN/EAN and ISSN/EAS standards. He was Technical Consultant to the ISBN Agency during the transition to bar code. He was also Technical Editor of the BIC Binder's Pack Bar Code Label Standard. In recent years he has been involved with the technical developments of RFID technology. He also advises the BIC/CILIP RFID for Libraries group on technical issues.

Tim Devenport is a business consultant and project manager active in the publishing industry. With a special focus on the serials sector, he has worked with many of the major academic and business publishers, including Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, Thomson, Elsevier and others. Tim's professional interests span two main areas. In the standards arena, he works to help international and cross-industry bodies like EDItEUR and ICEDIS to develop frameworks and messages that allow for automated and effective information and transactional exchange. Within publishing operations, he provides publishing clients with expertise in business analysis and the management of complex projects, typically spanning a number of functional areas and the implementation or migration of business systems for fulfilment, content hosting and e-commerce.

Katharina Klemperer holds an MLS from the University of California, Berkeley, and has worked in library systems at the University of California, Dartmouth College and Harvard University. She has also worked extensively with subscription agents and booksellers. She has participated in numerous standards activities with both NISO and EDItEUR. Kathy was heavily involved in the development of the ONIX for Serials family of messages and continues to provide support for these standards.

David Martin has been involved with standards for bibliographic data and machine-to-machine communication, and with the licensing of digital content, since 1967, initially as Systems Manager at the Institution of Electrical Engineers, where he led the development of the INSPEC database. After a period as General Manager of InfoLine Ltd, an online information services company, he was from 1981 to 1987 Director of Automated Services at The British Library. Subsequently he was one of the founder Directors of Book Data Ltd (now Nielsen BookData), and, from 1992 to 2002, Chairman of First EDItion EDI Services Ltd.

Over the past fifteen years David has also worked as an independent consultant on standards for business communication in the book trade, principally for BIC and EDItEUR, and on issues relating to the licensing of database products.