Interview
Linking the industry
‘Flying Dutchman’ Arnoud de Kemp, who turns 75 this year, reflects on a distinguished career in publishing
Tell us a little about your background and qualifications… By now, it is a long story: in need of money during my years of study, I started to do copy editing and to write blurbs for books in the evening; I became a part-time editorial assistant and then a full-time editor of non-fiction books. I edited a famous cookbook, looked after translations of Agatha Christie and I discovered John le Carré for the Dutch market. But soon I knew that I wanted to do something more serious, so I moved to Mouton in The Hague/Paris and then to Dr. Reidel Publishing Company in Dordrecht. I was privileged to be able to launch the company’s office in Boston. After Reidel was sold to Kluwer and became Kluwer Academic, Swets & Zeitlinger asked me in 1977 to manage the Swets Subscription Service In Lisse, where I learned a lot about automation and expanded the international Swets network significantly.
From the Netherlands to Germany In 1984 Springer offered me the chance to become its international director of sales and marketing in Berlin, Heidelberg and New York. Not much later, the new media department was added; here I became heavily involved in CD-ROMs, database development and online information systems.
In 1993 Springer joined the MeDoC
Electronic Library Project, a government project for electronic textbooks in computer science (please note: this was before PDF) and I was one of the project managers. We installed our first server at Springer in 1994, under great suspicion by our colleagues in production – this was the beginning of electronic publishing at Springer. We soon started to experiment
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with files from typesetters and created some early versions of electronic libraries, and on one day in 1996 LINK (Leadership in Networking Knowledge) was born. LINK is now SpringerLink and part of a big family; I managed a wonderful team and we were proud to be ahead of Elsevier. Already, by 2002, some 500 journals and 1,300 books were available on LINK. Yes, I guess I am the father of LINK! This job at Springer enabled me
to visit many places in the world, so I became known as the ‘flying Dutchman’. At the same time Springer allowed me to represent the company in various international associations and societies: chairman of Eusidic (three years), director of IEPRC (the International Electronic Publishing Research Center, 10 years), chairman of the Innovation Committee of the International Association Scientific,
Technical and Medical Publishers (STM, 10 years), and president of the German Society for Documentation (DGD, six years). Here, I enjoyed the international
exchange with many fine colleagues, and I helped to develop many conferences. During my last years at Springer I was acting as a member of the International Board. My professional life was also
accompanied by a number of mergers and acquisitions. In 2004 Springer and Kluwer Academic merged – and I felt that this was the right time to do something else…
You are probably best-known these days for organising the annual APE conference in Berlin... Soon after Springer I started a company, Digilibri (re-named as Digiprimo), building
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