PageBreak 2022 Speakers

Michael Tamblyn

CEO

Co-founder: bookshelf.ca (Canada's first online bookstore) and Indigo.ca; founder, BookNet Canada (digital supply chain wonderfactory); CEO of Rakuten Kobo (heart of the global ebook/audiobook/ereader resistance). Up-hill battle specialist and humblefantastic nerd.

Omo Oaiya

Chief Strategy Officer

Omo Oaiya, the Chief Strategy Officer of the West and Central Research and Education Network (WACREN), has service development and business planning as some of his responsibilities. As the pioneer CTO, he established the service design principles and developed the first network links to member countries. He currently leads LIBSENSE, a continent-wide initiative of REN and academic library communities strengthening local and national services to support open science and research in Africa.

Tim O'Reilly

Founder & CEO

Tim O'Reilly has a history of convening conversations that reshape the computer industry. He's played a key role in framing and evangelizing terms such as “open source software” “web 2.0” “the Maker movement” and “government as a platform”. He is the founder, CEO, and Chairman of O'Reilly Media, and a partner at early stage venture firm O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV). He is also on the boards of Code for America, PeerJ, Civis Analytics, and PopVox. His book, WTF: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, explores what technology advances teach us about the future economy and government as its “platform.” He is a Visiting Professor of Practice at University College London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, where he is researching a new approach to regulating big technology platforms by limiting their ability to extract economic rents.

Trina Michelle Robinson

Trina Michelle Robinson is a visual artist based in San Francisco who explores memory and migration. Her work has been exhibited at galleries and film festivals throughout the country including an upcoming solo exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). She told the story of exploring her ancestry with The Moth Mainstage on stages throughout the country including New York's Lincoln Center and NPR's Moth Radio Hour. She previously has worked in print and digital media in production and as a managing editor at companies such as The New York Times T Magazine, Vanity Fair and Slack.

Adam Hyde

John Chodacki

Michelle Walton

Co-owner

Peter Brantley

Niels 't Hooft

Co-Founder & CEO

Niels is a writer and entrepreneur, building the future of reading books on small screens at Immer, which won the Renew the Book Innovation Award 2021 and is now a ContentShift Accelerator finalist. The Immer Reader app was recently launched in early access. Niels wrote several novels and video games. In past professional lives he also was a games media founder, newspaper journalist, Nintendo translator, online games marketeer and digital literature researcher.

Alasdair Allan

Head of Documentation

Alasdair Allan is a scientist, author, maker, and journalist. He works for Raspberry Pi, and is responsible for their documentation. He is somewhat notorious for causing one of the first big mobile privacy scandals, which eventually became known as “locationgate.” A former astronomer, he built a peer-to-peer network of autonomous, reactive telescopes; and contributed to the detection of what — at the time — was the most distant object yet discovered in the Universe.

Amy Spencer

Researcher

Dr Amy Spencer is a postdoctoral researcher based in the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries at Bath Spa University where she researches narrative and emerging technologies. She is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction and is the author of DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture. She has an edited collection of essays on ambient literature forthcoming with Bloomsbury and has authored a report on innovation in the publishing industry.

Barbara Ruehling

CEO and Lead Facilitator

Barbara has been the CEO of Book Sprints since 2016, and focuses on streamlining their workflows. As a facilitator, Barbara's background in cultural anthropology and documentary film makes her observant and attentive to each group's unique process.

Bhuvana Meenakshi Koteeswaran

Socio-tech Researcher and founder of Women In Tech collectives,
India

Bhuvana Meenakshi Koteeswaran is a Socio-tech Researcher and founder of Women In Tech collectives, India, she is also Internationally recognized as a Mozillian, Wikimedian, and VRAR/ multidimensional space enthusiast. She is also a Program Manager at Coko Foundation. She is one of the recipients of the ShuttleWorth Flash Grant awards 2021. Bhuvana initiated the Women In Tech community in India to enable more voices of women who are interested in pursuing a career in tech or want to learn tech and to give opportunities for those who lost their careers in tech due to the pandemic. She is the co-founder of EmergeAbility, an initiative to make the digital world inclusive and accessible. She has also facilitated global events like MozFest, and Hack4OpenGLAM. She had been a mentor at Creep-a-thon hosted by Codam college, Amsterdam. She was one among the International Jury panel for the Open Publishing Awards and Wikipedia Pages wanting Photos campaign 2021.

Caroline Desrosiers

Founder & CEO

Caroline Desrosiers is the Founder & CEO of Scribely, a company on a mission to make images and videos more accessible to blind and visually impaired people and more discoverable to search engines. Scribely's team of expert writers specialize in writing alt text for images and audio description for videos, helping digital media providers create born-accessible visual content for a more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable world.

Cassandra Farrin

Director of Publishing and Production

Cassandra Farrin, Director of Publishing and Production. Cass (she/her) has been a champion of indie presses for the past ten years, doing everything from copyediting and proofreading to inventing production processes from scratch for a diverse array of academic and trade publishers. A US-UK Fulbright scholar in religious studies, she taught intercultural communication and interfaith dialogue before making the leap to publishing. Exploration of religion, culture, and ethics through the lens of speculative fiction is something she values deeply, both in her reading and in her own writing.

Emmanuel Kolade

Managing Director

Emmanuel is a digital technology executive with nearly two decades' experience across sectors and household brands. He is managing director at multi-format book retailer Shulph. His mission is to design a future that helps people absorb new knowledge easier and faster, so that more of us can increase our capacity to accelerate the world's collective growth.

Godwyns Onwuchekwa

Head of Communities

Before becoming the Head of Communities in eLife, Godwyns was the pioneering Community and Outreach Manager for Sciety. In that role, he oversaw the introduction of Sciety to potential users, building a user base for it and bringing new groups on board to display their preprint open review and evaluation activities on the website. An activist and a community engagement specialist with over 15 years of experience spanning the private, voluntary and public sectors, Godwyns has a passion for the diversity of opinions and participation. As the Head of Communities in eLife, Godwyns hopes to broaden engagement within the scholarly publishing community, amplifying the voice of minoritised groups and supporting early career researchers to play a more prominent role in the future landscape of science publishing and communication.

Helena Brantley

Principal

Helena Brantley is a public relations professional who works with scholars, subject experts and publishers, to promote non-fiction books. As principal of Pencil Public Relations + Marketing, a Company of One, Helena collaborates with a small team of subcontractors—designers, copy editors, writers, researchers, and other creatives—to develop promotional campaigns.

Early in her career, Helena worked for public relations and marketing agencies to promote Procter and Gamble's Oil of Olay, Microsoft DEI initiatives, Pacific Gas & Electric's Energy Star Financing and other brands. As a publicity director for HarperCollins Publishers, Helena designed and implemented best-selling publicity campaigns for Barbara Brown Taylor, Bart Ehrman, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Stephen Prothero, Deepak Chopra and others.

Helena is a proud native of New Jersey—Fort Lee, Princeton and Paterson—who lives with her husband and two daughters in Alameda, CA.

Jack Lerner

Clinical Professor of Law

Jack Lerner is a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law and Director of the UCI Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic. Professor Lerner works to find solutions to problems at the intersection of law and technology, particularly how technology law and policy affect creative expression and innovation. He has written and spoken widely on copyright, privacy and other areas of technology law. In the Clinic he directs, law students counsel and represent artists, journalists, filmmakers, policymakers, innovators, nonprofit organizations, and others on a range of copyright, media, and technology issues.

Jafreen Uddin

Executive Director

Jafreen Uddin was appointed Executive Director of the AAWW in January 2020. She is the first woman to lead the organization since its founding in 1991. With over a decade of experience working in the public sector, she specializes in communications, education, and fundraising. Prior to joining PEN America, she helped oversee Executive Education as an Assistant Director with NYU's Stern School of Business, developing and coordinating both degree and non-degree programming for cohorts of senior-level executives.

Jennifer Rose Halperin

Director

Jennie Rose Halperin (she/her/hers) is a digital strategist, community builder, and librarian who serves as Director of Library Futures at NYU's Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy. She is focused on growing the organization and its reach and fostering a culture of open, inclusive leadership to support equitable library policy, technology, and advocacy. Jennie joins Library Futures from Harvard Law School Library, where she served as the Assistant Director for Outreach and Community Engagement. Previously, she managed communications for Creative Commons and worked on growth and community at O'Reilly Media and Mozilla.

Johanna Vondeling

President and Publisher

Johanna Vondeling is Berrett-Koehler's President and Publisher. After joining the company in 2004, she served as VP for Editorial and Digital, and later as VP for International Sales and Business Development. Previously, she worked for Jossey-Bass (a Wiley imprint), W.W. Norton, and Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. She serves on the board of Bay Area Women in Publishing; she chairs that group's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee and co-chairs its Mentorship Task Force. She is also co-steward of the Berrett-Koehler DEIJ Working Group. She lives in Berkeley, CA.

John Erik "Buster" Bylander

Production Editor and Digital Content Specialist

John is a Brooklyn-based publishing professional with a strong background in writing, editing, design, production, and metadata. He brings over a decade of experience in book publishing and an enthusiasm for publishing innovation to his production editing and product development work.

Julie Blanc

Graphic Designer

I'm a graphic designer and CSS developer. I use web technologies (HTML5, CSS3, javascript, epub) to design all kinds of publications, both digital and printed. I contribute to the development of Paged.js, a tool to use web technologies for printing & I'm preparing a PhD in ergonomics and design graphic.

Micah Bowers

CEO

I create products that enable people to create and share stories and knowledge. I'm currently focused on a new platform called "Cloudshelf" that makes ebooks a first class citizen of the internet.

Pamela Berkman

Manager, Collection Development

Pam has worked in the publishing industry for three decades at organizations ranging from the global education, learning, assessment, and certification company John Wiley & Sons to the independent nonprofit publisher North Atlantic Books in Berkeley, CA. Her roles have varied from manufacturing coordinator to senior production manager to acquisitions editor to traditionally published author.

Pete Mulvihill

Co-owner

Pete Mulvihill is the co-owner of Green Apple Books, a trio of independent bookstores in San Francisco. Green Apple is a San Francisco Legacy Business which has connected good books with curious readers since 1967. He recently completed six years of volunteer service on the governing board of the American Booksellers Association. Pete lives in the outer Sunset with his spouse and twin teenagers, and, when not reading, he spends much of his time in or on the water.

Rebekah Borucki

Founder and President

Rebekah “Bex” Borucki (she/they) is a mother-to-five, self-help and children's author, and the Founder and President of Row House, Wheat Penny Press (Row House's children's imprint), and the WPP Little Readers Big Change Initiative. Since 2009, Rebekah has run an online wellness advocacy space through her BexLife platform. She has also served on the Yoga Alliance Equity Task Force and as a mentor for Hay House's Diverse Wisdom Initiative. Rebekah is driven by a commitment to make wellness tools available to all and to help others recover the liberation stolen from them by White Supremacy. She lives with her family in New Jersey.

Robert G. Martinengo

Freelance A11y Pundit (~troll)

I've been working with non-profits, tech, and academia for 25+ years to make people with disabilities, especially students, more accessible to authors, editors, and publishers. Are we there yet?

Sarah Guan

Publisher

Sarah is the Publisher of Erewhon Books, an independent speculative fiction publishing house. She is a Hugo Award-nominated editor who came to Erewhon after a varied career at Ace, DAW, and Orbit, and has worked with acclaimed and award-winning authors such as C. L. Polk, Cassandra Khaw, E. Lily Yu, Fonda Lee, Tasha Suri, Tade Thompson, Kacen Callender, among many others.

SJ Klein

Co-founder

Samuel Klein is an engineer and experimental ontologist, currently developing the Underlay Project for federating global public knowledge. He is a co-founder of the Knowledge Futures Group, designing ways to record and curate research that minimize barriers to entry and address systemic bias. He previously served as trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation, content director for One Laptop per Child, and built tools for translation, stargazing, and teaching physics.

Thad McIlroy

Thad McIlroy is a digital publishing analyst and author based in San Francisco. His site, The Future of Publishing, provides in-depth coverage of book publishing trends. The revised edition of his report on book publishing startups will be published in November, 2022. He is a partner in Publishing Technology Partners, and an adjunct professor in the Masters of Publishing Program at Pace University in New York.

Bill McCoy

Independent

Bill McCoy has played major roles in the establishment of numerous industry-standard publishing standards including EPUB, PDF, OpenType, and PostScript. Most recently Bill served as director of the Publishing Activity at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). He previously served as Executive Director of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), founded and served as President of the Readium Foundation open source consortium, and was General Manager, Digital Publishing at Adobe Systems, and founder & CEO, PictureIQ Corporation.

Brewster Kahle

Founder and Digital Librarian

A passionate advocate for public Internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his career intent on a singular focus: providing Universal Access to All Knowledge. He is the founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, one of the largest libraries in the world. Soon after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied artificial intelligence, Kahle helped found the company Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker. In 1989, Kahle created the Internet's first publishing system called Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), later selling the company to AOL. In 1996, Kahle co-founded Alexa Internet, which helps catalog the Web, selling it to Amazon.com in 1999. The Internet Archive, which he founded in 1996, now preserves 99+ unique petabytes of data - the books, Web pages, music, television, and software of our cultural heritage, working with more than 950 library and university partners to create a digital library, accessible to all.

Kathi Inman Berens

Associate Professor and Consultant: Book Publishing and VR/AR

Dr. Kathi Inman Berens consults with libraries, publishers and other book organizations about GenZ and millennial media behaviors. A UC Berkeley Ph.D. and tenured professor, Dr. Berens was the 2014-5 U.S. Fulbright Scholar of Digital Culture in Norway, and an Annenberg Innovation Lab Fellow at USC. Topics of interest: illegal downloading, reading platforms like Webtoon and Wattpad, book history, the future of libraries, and VR/AR. She publishes, podcasts, and gives talks around the world.

Lucy Lu Wang

Assistant Professor

Lucy Lu Wang is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Information School. Her research focuses on how to build better AI and NLP systems for extracting and understanding information from scientific texts; for example, can we create systems that leverage up-to-date literature to help us make better and more data-driven healthcare decisions, or design document understanding models that can improve the readability of scientific texts for people who are blind and low vision. Lucy's work on supplement interaction detection, gender trends in academic publishing, COVID-19 datasets, and document understanding has been featured in Geekwire, Boing Boing, Axios, VentureBeat, and the New York Times. Prior to joining the UW, she was a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI, and she received her PhD in Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education from the University of Washington.

Mateus Manço Teixeira

VP, Director of Digital Publishing

Mateus heads the Digital Publishing group in Norton's College Department—including Digital Publishing Solutions, Ebook Production, and Media Production teams—while serving as strategy lead and product owner for Norton Ebooks and Norton Testmaker. He is a proponent for open standards and acts as Norton's Advisory Committee Representative at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Rachel Noorda

Director of Publishing and Associate Professor of English

Dr. Rachel Noorda researches twenty-first century book topics such as entrepreneurship, marketing, small business, national identity, and international publishing. She is the author of Entrepreneurial Identity in U.S. Book Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press). She consults with libraries, publishers and other book organizations about media consumer behaviors.

Zoya Bylinskii

Research Scientist

Zoya is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the interface of human perception & cognition, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction, with applications to image processing, graphic design, and readability. She received her Computer Science Ph.D. from MIT, and an Hon. B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. Together with other founding members of The Readability Consortium, she is building the strategy and future for personalizing reading formats to the individual.

Dave Cramer

Senior Product Analyst

Dave Cramer is a Senior Product Analyst at Hachette Book Group, one of the "Big 5" trade publishers in the U.S. He develops standards, workflows, and tools for both print and ebook production using web technologies. He's a former member of the W3C's CSS Working Group, and helped edit specs on paged media. Dave is now co-chair of W3C's EPUB 3 Working Group, working on the forthcoming EPUB 3.3.

Kevin Franco

Senior Product Manager

Kevin is/was a serial entrepreneur, his last venture brought ebooks to physical retail stores. Now with Firebrand, Kevin works closely with book publishers along with Firebrand's development team creating new solutions to get more books into readers' hands.

Nellie McKesson

Founder and CEO

Nellie McKesson has over a dozen years of experience in publishing. She spent the early years of her career doing hands-on book production and layout, and then moved into more technical and managerial roles. As the market for ebooks began to rise, she taught herself web development and was an early evangelist for using web technologies in the book production process, before going on to found Hederis, an app that brings HTML typesetting and single-source workflows to publishers of any size. Nellie also teaches the ebooks course at Pace University and serves on the advisory board for Portland State University's publishing program.