By Claude Wilson,
Freelance Writer
WESTERN BUREAU:
JAMAICA IS poised to become a high-profile player in the e-book industry in the world of electronic commerce with the opening of the OverDrive Jamaica eBook Technology Centre, Montego Bay.
"We will be the single largest and most advanced e-book and electronic publishing centre in the world," Steve Potash, chief executive officer of OverDrive Inc., told reporters at a press briefing in Montego Bay this week.
He said that although it had not yet been fully established at its location in the Montego Bay Freezone, the information technology company has received praise and recognition from four of the six largest publishers in the world for the work that has so far been produced in Jamaica.
"We have been very pleased with our relationship with OverDrive Jamaica. They have been providing e-book conversion services for HarperCollins for the last few months, consistently delivering to us the highest quality product, always on schedule," according to David Steinberger, president of corporate strategy for HarperCollins publishers.
OverDrive has its headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio, and its major clients include divisions of McGraw-Hill, Random House, Time Warner, HarperCollins, Microsoft Press, and other leading education and textbook publishers.
OverDrive Jamaica will be pioneering many of the developments for extending books, reference materials, textbooks, literature and journals into new digital channels and will shortly become the foremost centre for e-book automation serving the US and international markets, Potash said.
Jamaica was selected by OverDrive after it researched global business, education, and technological resources.
"With Jamaica and Cleveland, Ohio sharing the same time zone (EST) we have our US and Jamaican production teams in sync," said Druanne Martin, OverDrive's director of publishing services.
The first local facility was opened last year and it is now being expanded to add more than 200 new e-book staff.
According to Phillip Paulwell, Minister of Industry, Commerce and Technology, the association with personal computer giant Microsoft, will enable Jamaica to be highly placed in e-commerce opportunities as readers will now have more access to books on the Internet. "It will be clear where the work was originating from and this will really put the country on the Internet map," he told The Gleaner. OverDrive, Inc. is a world leader in software, e-commerce, and content conversion services to the book industry.
