Board Election 2025

In 2025, three seats are to be renewed: those previously occupied by Cristina Mussinelli (LIA), Luisa Gaggini (Casalini Libri) and Marion Berthaut (Mobidys).

Self-nomination period: June 12, 2025, to August 31, 2025.

Voting period: September 3 to September 15, 2025.

By our bylaws, any member in good standing is eligible to self-nominate a representative. Current or past members of the Board of Directors can reapply for a new period of two years.

Five members have candidated for this election:

• Cristina Mussinelli (LIA)
• Luisa Gaggini (Casalini Libri)
• Ian Smith (Glassboxx)
• Fransceso Pandini (MediaLibraryOnLine (MLOL) – Horizons Unlimited)
• Senthil Nathan (Ailaysa Technologies Private Limited)

Here are their candidate statements:

Cristina Mussinelli

Dear colleagues,

As many of you know, I’ve had the pleasure of serving on the EDRLab Board as Secretary General of Fondazione LIA. I’m now standing for re-election, and I’d be grateful for your support to continue this work together.

Over the past years, I’ve been fully committed to EDRLab’s mission: building a more open, interoperable, and accessible digital publishing landscape in Europe. If re-elected, I’ll keep contributing my experience, time, and network to advance our shared goals—particularly in areas I’ve long been involved in:

• Helping publishers adopt open standards like EPUB for all kinds of publications, including complex formats. This means not just technical support, but also information sharing, training, and collaboration through events like the Digital Publishing Summit—and joint EU projects, such as ABELab.
• Strengthening the accessibility of digital publications, especially with the EU Accessibility Act now in place. I’ll continue helping shape EDRLab’s strategy in this crucial area.
• Supporting the development of open-source reading engines across platforms, to ensure that inclusive and standards-based reading apps can flourish.
• Encouraging broader awareness and adoption of standards throughout the publishing chain—and engaging with institutions at EU and international levels to promote fair, competitive, and innovation-friendly digital markets.
• Growing the EDRLab community by engaging both current members and potential new ones from across Europe and beyond.

My responsibility at Fondazione LIA is closely aligned with EDRLab’s priorities. LIA promotes accessibility across the publishing sector through training, research, and consultancy. We support publishers and content creators in making books truly available to all readers—including those with visual impairments.

LIA was established by AIE (Associazione Italiana Editori), where I also coordinate digital publishing initiatives. AIE’s strong links with European and international organizations (like FEP, IPA, EDITEUR, and ABPTOE) and its role in managing ISBN and DOI services give me additional opportunities to support EDRLab’s work on interoperability and standards at scale.

Beyond that, I actively participate in key industry groups, including:

• W3C Digital Publishing Business Group (as co-chair)
• UNI standardization committee on EPUB and LPC
• DAISY European Inclusive Publishing Forum (Steering Committee)
• ABC Consortium (WIPO) Accessibility Steering Committee

I’d be honoured to continue contributing to the Board with the same passion and commitment I’ve brought so far. Thank you for considering my candidacy—I hope to keep working alongside you to move digital publishing forward.

Warm regards,

Cristina Mussinelli

Luisa Gaggini

Dear EDRLab Members,

I am pleased to submit my candidacy for a position on the Board of Directors.

Currently, I serve as Head of Digital Division at Casalini Libri, a role I have held for over 15 years. During this time, I have gained extensive experience across diverse contexts, launching from the ground up several services designed to distribute digital academic publications to institutions.

The Torrossa online platform, initially focused on Romance-language titles, now distributes over one million digital items — including articles, book chapters, eBooks, and journal issues — from 610 international publishers. These are made available through various licensing models and dedicated B2C and B2B institutional channels. Our mission is twofold: to enhance the discoverability of small and independent publishers, and to provide customers with a single access point to a broad range of academic content.

In recent years, Casalini has expanded our efforts by working with Fondazione LIA to ensure accessibility compliance, and by collaborating with EDRLab to adopt Thorium for our desktop and mobile reading applications, and LCP for DRM solutions.
In my current role, I coordinate a team of seven, overseeing distribution workflows and the management of e-content from acquisition to redistribution. My responsibilities also include facilitating communication between sales & marketing and the web development teams, testing new web functionalities, troubleshooting access and authentication issues, and contributing to working groups focused on enhancing online services for end users.

Since 2023, I have been serving on the EDRLab Board, where I have valued the opportunity to learn from colleagues through dialogue and collaboration. I am confident I have also contributed meaningfully by voicing the perspectives of stakeholders who are sometimes underrepresented in international boards.

For these reasons, I would be honoured to continue this commitment by renewing my mandate as a member of the EDRLab Board. I am motivated to work toward the definition of open standards and system interoperability, and to actively contribute to building an ecosystem in which publishers, distributors, and users alike can thrive.

Best regards
Luisa Gaggini

Ian Smith

Best regards
Ian Smith

Franscesco Pandini

Dear colleagues,

it’s been a few years since I’ve been following accessibility topics for the Bologna-based company I work for. Since 2009 Horizons Unlimited has provided Italian public, schools and academic libraries with a platform for digital lending which allows them to lend their users ebooks, audiobooks and other types of contents. MLOL (MediaLibraryOnLine) is the name of a service that’s nearly become synonymous of digital lending, here in Italy: as of now, we brought it to 6.500 public libraries and 2.500 school libraries.

As a project manager, I coordinated the works for the transition from Adobe to Readium LCP DRM in 2021, a major improvement for accessibility in itself. At the same time I’ve been working with our developers on MLOL Ebook Reader, an app available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android and iOS. With this LCP-compliant app, used yearly by over two hundred thousands library patrons, any MLOL user can read ebooks and listen to audiobooks provided by their library.

MLOL started working on accessibility more than 10 years ago, before I began working here. First, we introduced the LIA mark for accessible ebooks in our catalogue to show the accessibility specifics provided by Fondazione LIA for each title. From there we started working on the website and then, a few years later, on our reading/listening app. The reason was simple: we wanted libraries to be able to include the whole spectrum of readers’ needs, to really become a public service for each and everyone.

Since I’m also responsible for librarian training at Horizons Unlimited, I’ve made sure to dedicate significant sections of my courses to exploring the accessibility features offered by our app. It’s been and still is a very fulfilling activity: continuous librarian training is crucial for raising awareness of the potential of digital lending, and meeting them and addressing their requests and concerns is the only way for us to offer an increasingly inclusive service.

It’s with this sense of purpose that I ask you to consider my candidacy for the board. As a former librarian myself, I wish I could be of any help in putting libraries and their needs at the heart of the discourse, since accessibility is not about laws, markets, strategies and products: it’s about people.

Kind regards,

Francesco Pandini
Project manager

Senthil Nathan

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to express my interest in joining the EDRLab board and contributing to its mission of advancing digital publishing globally.

I am Senthil Nathan, Chief Executive Officer of Ailaysa, an artificial intelligence company that specialises in multilingual content solutions. We recently launched Chai Reader, an innovative chatbooks platform that enables users to discover books and explore content within them through interactive conversation. Additionally, I serve as a publisher based in Tamil Nadu, India, and had the privilege of acting as international coordinator for the Chennai International Book Fair during its inaugural two years.

I believe eBooks represent a transformative opportunity in the emerging economies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where traditional print publishing markets have yet to realise their full potential in expanding readership. The widespread adoption of smartphones across these regions has enabled entire generations to transition directly into digital reading. However, publishers, authors, and broader ecosystems—including governmental and educational institutions—remain insufficiently aware of the advantages that eBooks and digital publishing can offer. With translation technologies and artificial intelligence now at the forefront of publishing innovation in these markets, there exists significant potential to advance both eBook adoption and EDRLab’s mission.

My particular focus lies in emerging markets, and should I be selected for the board, I would dedicate my efforts to the following initiatives:

1. Promoting eBooks and EDRLab across Asia (whilst maintaining focus on Africa and Latin America for later), targeting publishers and major stakeholders including governments, libraries, and telecommunications content aggregators.
2. Enhancing EDRLab’s multilingual capabilities by helping to incorporate localisation and translation features for non-Latin and non-Cyrillic languages prevalent across Asia and beyond.
3. Organising eBook festivals in university towns, collaborating with local authorities, educational institutions, and publishers whilst securing sponsorship support.
4. Expanding membership by recruiting at least one or two representatives from Asian countries where EDRLab currently has limited presence.
5. Promoting EDRLab members at international book fairs (which I regularly attend throughout Asia) and facilitating speaking opportunities and partnership arrangements for member organisations.

Chai Reader, our primary offering to the publishing industry, has begun implementing Readium technology. As we utilise EDRLab’s innovations, we recognise our responsibility to reciprocate by extending its reach and impact. The realisation of EDRLab’s mission directly aligns with the success we envision for platforms such as Chai Reader.

Beyond my publishing industry involvement, I actively participate in language technology initiatives with the Government of Tamil Nadu and serve as a member of Citlob, the apex organisation representing language technology companies in India.

I am committed to bringing fresh perspectives from emerging markets to EDRLab’s board and would welcome the opportunity to discuss how my experience and network can contribute to advancing our shared objectives.

Yours sincerely,

Senthil Nathan
CEO, Ailaysa Technologies Pvt Ltd.