Peter Brantley is the Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation, a not-for-profit international association of libraries and allied institutions. His background includes significant experience with research libraries and digital library development programs. He has served as a technology director at the California Digital Library, New York University, UC Berkeley, and UCSF. He was the first IT Manager for Rapt, a private firm providing pricing optimization for online advertising delivery, and eons ago worked as a systems analyst in the mass-market division of Random House. Peter is a member of the Board of Directors for the International Digital Publishing Forum. He was first introduced to computing via the CDC Plato system.

Robert Darnton. Robert Darnton is an American cultural historian, recognized as a leading expert on eighteenth century France. He graduated from Harvard University in 1960, attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship, and earned a Ph.D. (D. Phil.) in history from Oxford in 1964. He worked as reporter at The New York Times from 1964 to 1965. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982.  He joined the Princeton University faculty in 1968 as a Professor of European History.  In 1999 he was named a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur, the highest award given by the French government, in recognition of his work. In 2004 he was awarded the Gutenberg prize by the International Gutenberg Society. In 2005 he received an award for distinguished achievement from the American Printing History Association.  On July 1, 2007, he was appointed director of the Harvard University Library.

Darnton is a pioneer in the growing field of the history of the book. One of his books, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1995. He currently is writing about electronic publishing. He is founder of the Gutenberg-e program, sponsored by Mellon Foundation.   [Wikipedia, 24-02-2008]

Jason Epstein worked at Doubleday & Co from 1950-58, and launched trade paperbacks in 1952 with Anchor Books. Winner of the Carey-Thomas Award. Resided at Random House 1958-99; VP, Editorial Director circa 1970-1990. Co-founder in 1963 of the New York Review of Books. Co-founder with Edmund Wilson of the Library of America in 1982. Winner, National Book Critics Circle Award. Founder in 1987 of the Readers Catalog. Chairman and co-founder of On Demand Books 2005. Winner of the National Book Award for distinguished contribution etc.; recipient of Curtis Benjamin Award for Lifetime Achievement, American Association of Publishers. Author: Book Business: 2001; seven translations.

Joseph J. Esposito is an independent consultant providing strategy assessment and interim management to the information industries. He has served as an executive at Simon & Schuster and Random House, as President of Merriam-Webster, and CEO of Encyclopaedia Britannica, where he was responsible for the launch of the first Internet service of its kind. Mr. Esposito has also served as CEO of Internet communications company Tribal Voice and SRI Consulting, both of which he led to successful exits. Among Mr. Esposito’s clients have been such technology companies as Microsoft and Hewlett Packard, various publishers of all stripes, and a growing number of not-for-profit organizations (e.g., JSTOR, the University of California Press, and the American Nationals Standards Institute).

Bill Janssen. Having read avidly and widely as a child, Bill found himself unable to break the habit, despite a formal education in mathematics. He now reads about reading and tries to understand understanding at a widely-known research center. In his spare time, he’s the chief cook and bottle-washer of the UpLib personal digital library system.

Michael Jensen has been at the interface between digital technologies and scholarly/academic publishing since the late 1980s. He was recently appointed Director of Strategic Web Communications for the National Academies. From 1998 to 2007, he was Director of Publishing Technologies at the National Academies Press, which makes more than 3700 books (more than 650,000 pages) from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council fully browsable and searchable online for free. The site receives more than 1.5 million visitors per month, and boasts some of the most advanced search and discovery tools available on any book publisher’s site, many of which he initially conceived and developed.

Jim Lichtenberg. As president Lightspeed, LLC, a management consulting practice in New York City, Jim Lichtenberg provides strategic counsel to a range of clients in general business and book publishing. A primary focus is how profitably to manage the impact of information technology on business models, processes and structures. Among his clients: Book Manufacturers Institute, Publishing Technology (Vista), The Conference Board, Dell, Lightning Source, Houghton Mifflin, John Wiley, the American Library Association, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), and The Authors Guild. Past senior vice president at the corporate public relations firm of Hill and Knowlton, he was named vice president, Higher Education Division, the Association of American Publishers in 1993. Returning to independent practice, he founded Lightspeed, LLC in February, 1997.

Mike Shatzkin, Founder & CEO of The Idea Logical Company, focusing primarily on the publishing supply chain and the challenges of digital change. He has authored several books, agented many more, directed both production and marketing, sold books to all channels, and put together sales and distribution organizations. He started his professional publishing career as a clerk in Brentano’s bookstore when the paperback department was brand new. Mike has written and spoken extensively about digital change for the past 15 years, organized several conferences in New York, London, and Frankfurt, and has spread the idea that general trade publishing houses will be severely challenged by 21st century developments.

Juliet Sutherland guides Distributed Proofreaders, a completely volunteer website that turns public domain printed material into etexts, which she joined in 2002. Her educational background is in computer science, and her desire to understand complex systems has put her into jobs that have ranged from systems engineering telephone equipment to income tax preparation. Her current passions are raising her teenagers and old books. As a result, she is often confused about which century she is in.