In a panel at The O’Reilly “Tools of Change” conference today, publishing CTOs talked about their wishes to make digital publishing easier.

Andrew Savikas, CTO of O’Reilly Media, wishes that Amazon would adopt ePUB as their standard, which got a cheer from the audience. “That would go a long way to getting people to adopt an eBook,” he said.

Bill Godfrey, CTO of Elsevier, wishes “not to have to worry about how my content is rendered on multiple devices. We’ve got to get to some defacto industry standards.”

Rich Rothstein, CTO of HarperCollins Publishers, wishes for “an XML workflow that allows us to mirror our current production processes so that things that don’t get too slowed down.” He also pointed out that the industry needs to start thinking about multichannel distribution in the programming end.