Garth Conboy
President, eBook Technologies, Inc.

Garth Conboy is a founding member of the IDPF, and currently serves as the Chairman of the IDPF Board of Directors. He has chaired or vice-chaired the numerous technical working groups that have developed and evolved the EPUB standard since its inception.

Garth is co-founder and President of eBook Technologies, Incorporated (ETI). The ETI team played significant roles in pioneering the eBook market, releasing the first commercial eBooks in 1998 and they continue to drive innovation in electronic book systems. ETI provides and licenses a leading end-to-end electronic book platform offering a full range of eBook products and services. The company possesses deep industry knowledge and the end-to-end technology components to support both enterprise and consumer eBook publishing: content acquisition, conversion, wholesaling, retailing, DRM, distribution, and reading.

Prior to co-founding ETI, Garth served as the General Manager and Vice President of Software Engineering for the Gemstar eBook Group. In these positions he was responsible for the operation of the division: platform and server engineering, quality assurance, content acquisition, content operations, content engineering, and customer support.

Garth is inventor or co-inventor of numerous eBook-related patents; technologies include: cryptography and secure content distribution, eBook UI, resource/database dynamic conversion for cross-platform applications, and optimal paginated document presentation. Prior to its acquisition by Gemstar in 2000, Garth held the position of Vice President of Software Engineering at SoftBook Press leading the platform, content tools, and content engineering teams.

Prior to the eBook effort, Garth founded Pacer Software in 1980 and served as its CEO guiding it to a successful acquisition in 1995.

Sessions

1:40pm Monday, 02/11/2008

Making Digital Publishing Accessible to Persons Who are Blind and Print Disabled

Digital Strategy, General, Open Access Shubert/Uris

George Kerscher (Daisy Consortium), Arnie Zucker (NDS Technologies Ltd.), Ivan Lagacé (HumanWare), Garth Conboy (eBook Technologies, Inc.)

Technology has made it possible for publishers to profitably expand to include persons who are blind and print disabled. The growing legal demands to serve this population makes this a timely issue. Read more.

2:00pm Tuesday, 02/12/2008

Are New Devices Breathing New Life into e-Books?

Broadway South

Tonya Engst (TidBITS Publishing Inc.), Ben Vershbow (New York Public Library), Mike Shatzkin (The Idea Logical Company), David Rothman (TeleRead.org), Steven Levy (Newsweek), Garth Conboy (eBook Technologies, Inc.)

Although Arthur Andersen famously predicted a billion-dollar e-Book market would be here by now, 2007 was a big year for the e-Book faithful, with the launch of Amazon's Kindle, the first experiments with delivery of digital books on revolutionary new mobile devices like the iPhone and the $100-laptop Read more.