Graham Bell appointed Executive Director of EDItEUR
The Board of EDItEUR has announced the appointment of Graham Bell as the Executive Director of EDItEUR with effect from 1 April 2014, in succession to Mark Bide. Mark retires from EDItEUR at the end of March, having served over 5 years as Executive Director.
Graham has been the Chief Data Architect of EDItEUR since joining the organisation in June 2010. Graham joined from HarperCollins Publishers where most recently he was Head of Publishing Systems. He led the development of bibliographic and digital asset management systems, and was involved with the launches of many recent HarperCollins digital initiatives including e-audio, e-books and print-on-demand programmes. Prior to HarperCollins, he worked as an editor and in IT roles within the magazine industry with Redwood Publishing and BBC Magazines.
Paola Mazzucchi of Associazione Italiana Editori (the Italian Publishers Association), the Chair of the Board of EDItEUR, said of Graham’s appointment: “Graham is the right man, in the right place at the right time. His appointment as Executive Director is the natural realisation of EDItEUR’s strategy over the last few years. Standards and standard-based technologies are more and more at the heart of a changing publishing industry, and so is EDItEUR; with Graham, we will underline this position and be ready to face exciting new challenges. Thanks to Mark for taking EDItEUR to where it is today. We can now look forward to Graham steering us through the years ahead.”
Graham Bell said in response “I’m delighted to accept the invitation from the Board to become Executive Director, and I look forward to leading EDItEUR – both its members and its staff – through the next chapter. The metadata and e-commerce standards that EDItEUR develops, plus the standards it manages, become ever more critical to the global book and serials trade. Inevitably, the pace of technical change across the industry presents a challenge to those standards, but I believe the knowledge and experience of EDItEUR’s staff and its global membership ensure the organisation is well equipped to meet that challenge.”
Mark Bide added: “EDItEUR is extremely fortunate in having the ideal candidate to take over the reins of the organisation at this exciting time in its development. Graham is extremely well placed to understand how to maintain the stability essential to a standards organisation, while ensuring that we continue to meet the changing requirements of our members and of the supply chains that they represent. It has been my great privilege to run EDItEUR, and I have hugely enjoyed my time here –I am sure Graham will also enjoy his new responsibilities.”
Note for editors: About EDItEUR
EDItEUR is the London-based global trade standards organisation for the book and journal supply chains, with over 100 members in over 20 countries. It is perhaps best known for ONIX for Books, used around the world for sharing book product metadata in the book supply chain, but has also developed a wide range of other standards that are widely used in the commercial management of books and journals under the ONIX, EDItX, Thema and EDIFACT brands. As well as its own standards portfolio, EDItEUR offers services to other standards organisations: it runs the International ISBN Agency and also provides support to the International ISTC Agency and the International ISNI Agency.
Contact: Graham Bell +44 (0)20 7503 6418 graham@editeur.org