I’m thrilled to announce the formation of Publishing Technology Partners, a new partnership related to my consulting activities in book publishing. We’re launching today at the Book Industry Study Group’s annual meeting in NYC, though we have already gotten press coverage.

Publishing Technology Partners consists of myself and four guys whom I have known for an average of about twenty years each:

• Ken Brooks is an operations and supply chain expert who has held senior management positions at several large educational and trade publishers as well as Barnes & Noble. We worked together in the mid-1990s on the design of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) standard.
• Bill Kasdorf is a peripatetic household name in the publishing technology standards world, particularly on issues related to XML, metadata, and accessibility. I met him in the DOI context and have worked with him on various standards initiatives.
• Thad McIlroy is an expert in production and marketing aspects of publishing, and the author of a number of influential market studies on digital publishing. He was Program Chair of the Seybold publishing technology conference during its glory years in the late 1990s, where I met him and got my first experiences in conference production. We’ve worked together on consulting projects for Brother, the printer maker.
• Bill Trippe is a content management and XML expert who was previously IT Director at MIT Press and Lead Analyst at Outsell/Gilbane Group. He was the co-author of my book on DRM back in 2001. I brought Bill in on consulting projects for Hewlett-Packard, Consumers Union, and Pearson.

I don’t mind saying that these folks collectively have such a wide range of expertise that it’s highly likely to cover any technology issue in publishing today. I’m chuffed to be associated with them!