Chief Executive Officer at DAISY Consortium, a global partnership of organizations committed to create the best way to read and publish, for everybody.
Orme is a board member of The Right to Read Alliance is a partnership of organisations working to improve access to information for people with print disabilities in the UK. By joining together aims to present a unified voice to engage with government, publishers and technology companies.
Daniel Weck is a software engineer who works with the DAISY Consortium, a global not-for-profit organisation whose aim is to ensure that persons with print disabilities (e.g. people who are blind, visually-impaired, dyslexic) have equal access to information and knowledge, without delay or additional expense.
For the past decade, Daniel has developed open-source software in the fields of multimedia and electronic publishing («e-books»), including validation utilities, authoring tools and reading systems.
Gardeur is in charge of all key products at De Marque, such as Hub: a distribution service for publishers; Station/Biblius: content portals for libraries and schools ; Reader (Aldiko): mobile and Web apps for ebooks/audiobooks/comics; Market (Feedbooks) and Boutique through which we operate both B2C and B2B sales channels. Gardeur is also founder and board member of EDRLab (elected twice for a board seat).
Tröger is founder of Bookalope, an online service that provides customers with intelligent and scalable tools that analyze and convert books: from AI-assisted content analysis to structured content extraction, from flagging and fixing stylistic, textual, and typographical issues, to conversion for electronic and print publishing or for other integrated publishing workflows.
He is also working at Talaera responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the technology that drives the Talaera experience. Currently working with a small team of experienced developers, we are building our own cloud infrastructure while integrating tightly into existing services provided by Tokbox, Google, AWS, and others.
Liisa McCloy-Kelley is VP, Director eBook Development & Innovation, Random House. She
works to create innovative new ebook products and drive new reading functionality across the ebook marketplace. She co-leads a corporate team of developers, designers and producers who are responsible for all of the ebooks of Penguin Random House US divisions as well as many of their client publishers. She has worked at PRH for more than 26 years and has dedicated the last decade to advancing ebook development in support of authors and their expanding needs for how to best express their stories in digital format. She has worked on a variety of ebook standards with numerous organizations and serves on the Board of Directors of the IDPF.
My motto: «If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.» Donald Draper
Dr Alexandra Borg is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature and a lecturer in Swedish. She completed her PhD in 2011, with a dissertation on the fin de siècle-literature of Stockholm (1898–1916). From 2012 to 2015 she was an embedded researcher at Bonnier Publishing Group.
Borg’s research concerns modern publishing business and the future of the book, particularly the connections between new forms of production and the aesthetic of bookishness. She teaches publishing studies, book history, literary theory and methods, and academic writing. Her recent monograph, Strindbergs lilla röda: Boken om boken och typerna (with Nina Ulmaja) was nominated for The August Prize in the category Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2019.
She’s also been the chair of the jury for the Lars Salvius’s Society, 2018–2020 and chair for assessment committee for evaluation of courses and undergraduate degree programme in Physics, Uppsala University.
My life motto? “It’s got to go bang and it has to be fun, otherwise I won’t come”, as Astrid Lindgren’s character Karlsson says in The World’s Best Karlsson (1968).
Dr. Erik Wikberg is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm School of Economics focused on art and literature. He is also an Assistant Professor in War Studies at The Swedish Defense University, and an Expert Member for non-fiction literature in the Swedish Arts Council. Moreover, he is a columnist, a self-employed consultant and a co-owner of a fin-tech startup (Finc AB). Since 2014, he has written 15 reports on book sales statistics for the Swedish Booksellers Association and the Swedish Publishers Association. All in all, he has more than 70 publications.
His current research is focused on plural institutional logics in the organizational field of Sweden’s literature industry. He has previously studied how different cultural organizations, mainly in the art world, handles contradictory demands. This summer, he publishes two books on Sternberg Press in Germany: Economic Ekphrasis: Goldin+Senneby and Art for Business Education (co-edited with professor Pierre Guillet de Monthoux) and Artful Objects: Graham Harman on Art and the Business of Speculative Realism (co-edited with Isak Nilson).
He was the first Director of Stockholm School of Economics Literary Agenda from 2018 to 2020, a joint collaboration between Stockholm School of Economics and McKinsey & Co. In the second year of the initiative, it had recruited more than 400 students, which was five times more than the aim. The initiative arranged book circles of contemporary fiction literature and had author talks with for example Ian McEwan, Jennifer Clement, Mircea Cărtărescu and Viet Thanh Nguyen at the university college.
“For content creators to truly connect with consumers and leave a lasting impression, the impact of established human traits, habits and social constructs needs to be considered”
Olivia Valentine is a Senior Strategic Insights Analyst at GlobalWebIndex, a market research company running the world’s largest ongoing survey on the digital consumer. She analyses this rich dataset to uncover insights in media and beyond to deconstruct consumer needs and behaviors, helping brands and marketers to know and understand ever changing audiences.
Culture as a shared set of believes, behaviours and values is constantly being remodelled.
Verónica Reyero is a business anthropologist based in Valencia, Spain. She graduated in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Granada and holds a Master’s degree on Rational Use of Medicines from the University of Valencia. As a researcher, Veronica has worked both in public and private organisations in national and international projects for various sectors including health, food, technology and Real Estate. Verónica is one of the founding partners of Antropología 2.0, a pioneering agency in applying an anthropological understading to business challenges. Reyero is also convener of the Applied Anthropology Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA).
Under stress, we learn what is essential in reading – the words, the stories, knowledge, escape or immersion. Everything else is just means of delivery.
Michael Tamblyn, President and Chief Executive Officer at Rakuten Kobo, drives growth, profitability and international expansion in a fiercely competitive market. He combines a passion for reading with a deep focus on hardware and software experiences. In addition to leading Rakuten Kobo, the global digital bookseller, He advises startups focused on aging and technology as Chief Entrepreneur of Age-Well NCE, is on the board of directors of the Law Commission of Ontario, Ontario’s law reform body, as well as The Power Plant, Toronto’s foremost contemporary art gallery. Michael has been a part of Rakuten Kobo’s executive team since its inception in 2009, and previously held the role of Chief Content Officer. He holds a Master’s in Business Administration from the University of Western Ontario.
