Jon Noring — Digital Publishing Bio

Jon Noring portraitJon Noring is a long-time e-book publisher, technologist, advocate, entrepreneur, standards developer, and community builder.

Current position

Jon is an independent consultant for the digital publishing industry, under the banner of Windspun Technologies. His complete background and experience is given in his LinkedIn profile.

Many years of digital publishing entrepreneurship

Jon is one of the early e-book pioneers, having found OmniMedia Digital Publishing in 1993. During the 1990’s, OmniMedia published a catalog of e-books from both contemporary authors (including Michel Basilières who has since become a well-known author published by Random House) and various public domain works.

OmniMedia Digital Publishing has since morphed, and is still in operation today as the much more modest Blue Glass Publishing—Jon’s way of keeping in direct, personal touch with the distribution and retail sides of the e-book industry.

Within the area of e-book technology development, Jon co-founded and was a director in several companies, including Exemplary Technologies and Yomu (Yomu fell victim to the dot-com crash as did just about all the other e-book related start-ups of that time.) Other more recent companies and initiatives include Windspun, KidzTel/GraffitiWorkz, and LibraryCity.

Jon is currently working on several profit and non-profit business initiatives as part of his association with DigitalPulp Publishing. As any get further along, more will be revealed about them.

Open standards advocate and IDPF working group contributor

In digital publishing open standards, Jon is a long-time contributor to the IDPF from when it started as the Open eBook Forum in 1999.

Currently he technically contributes to IDPF’s OEBPS Working Group (OWG) and the OEBPS Container Working Group.

Prior to that he served as an invited expert to the OeBF Publication Structure Working Group (PSWG, the antecedent to OWG), and held leadership positions including Chair of the Maintenance subgroup, and acting Vice Chair of PSWG. He contributed to all three versions of IDPF’s OEBPS 1.x specification, and to the current suite of successor standards: OPS 2.0, OPF 2.0 and OCF 1.0 which underlie “ePub”.

Mr. Noring has become a well-known expert in applying XML technologies to e-books and digital publishing. In May 2003, for eBookWeb (no longer active), Jon published a seminal article, “OEBPS: The Universal Consumer eBook Format?” which launched the OpenReader open standards effort. OpenReader is said to have spurred IDPF to bite the bullet and develop ePub as an open standard e-book distribution format.

Currently, Jon is working on two related technology standards intended to benefit the e-book industry, especially for smaller publishers: the Generalized Container Format, and the BookX markup vocabulary. In addition, Jon is scoping out an open standard format for third-party annotation of, and linking between, digital publications.

Creating and nurturing online digital publishing communities

As an e-book advocate and creator of a number of online communities, in 1996 Jon founded, and still administers, The eBook Community (TeBC). TeBC is the Internet’s oldest, largest and most respected general e-book industry forum, with almost 3000 subscribers whose membership list reads as a virtual “Who’s Who” of the e-book industry.

Recently he founded The Digital Text Community (DTC) to discuss advanced issues in digitizing “ink-on-paper” publications.

And very recently he founded the Digital Publishing Network (DPN), a LinkedIn group which already has several hundred digital publishing professionals as members and growing fast.

Jon has published a number of articles on a variety of topics to the TeleRead Blog, mostly related to e-book advocacy. The TeleRead Blog has rapidly become the top general topic e-book blog on the Internet.

Other media-related interests

Jon also has an interest in the high quality digitization of the classic books in the public domain, and occasionally contributes his “one page a day” to Distributed Proofreaders. He and a couple associates continue to study the feasibility of mass digitization of the huge number of pre-World War II audio recordings—another long-time interest of his. Jon is also interested in building a non-profit audio CD repository for digitization and archiving all known commercial audio CDs (yes, may as well think big!) Jon has also explored museum-quality fractal art printing and retains an interest in that.

Life prior to digital publishing…

In a prior life, a very long time ago, in a galaxy far-far-away, Dr. Noring was a researcher for three DOE National Laboratories in alternate energy conversion technologies (primarily solar thermal power systems, hydrogen production, nitrogen fixation, and biomass conversion), and still actively consults in that area.

He holds a Ph.D. (1981) in mechanical engineering (with a supporting in chemical engineering and a heavy emphasis on computer modeling) from the University of Minnesota. Dr. Noring did cutting edge published research in biomass and solar thermochemical conversion while a graduate student, and assisted in the design and construction of a state-of-the-art solar furnace whose innovations are still influential today (that project was led by Dr. Richard B. Diver, one of the most respected solar energy researchers in the world today.)

Dr. Noring is very excited to see renewed interest in commercial solar power after two long and “dark” decades. For example, refer to eSolar, a company in which Google has taken an interest.

Related to publishing, Dr. Noring is published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals, and has himself been a peer-reviewer. As such, Dr. Noring has an especial interest in online journal publishing and other formalized online knowledge sources such as the Wikipedia.

Karsten MolinaroContacting Jon Noring

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