20 Years Later: OBS, Innovation, and the Frankfurt Book Fair
From October 8-12, OBS president Laura Fillmore will be attending the Frankfurt Book Fair in Frankfurt, Germany. A major conference in the publishing industry, last year’s Fair hosted over 7,000...
View ArticleOBS President to Present at the 12th International Conference on Books,...
Since its founding in 1982, OBS has been a thought leader and an innovator in the digital publishing space. The pace continues, 32 years later: OBS president and founder Laura Fillmore will be...
View ArticleIt’s Easy as… PI
OBS is excited to be working with Common Ground’s new product Scholar — “a web writing space for learners of the social media generation” — to explore the dynamic interface where content (aka “books”)...
View ArticleOBS at the London Book Fair
Having traveled the world as a publishing innovator and leader, OBS president Laura Fillmore is no stranger to hopping the pond. That said, she is very much looking forward to attending the London Book...
View ArticleYesterday’s Business: Managed Hosting
In the early days of the Internet, OBS used to not only design and develop internet solutions for publishers, but we also served as a managed host for the custom applications we built – keeping the...
View ArticleAccessibility>ASCII: ADA Expected To Get New Teeth in July
When the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was introduced in 1990, compliance for the hearty band of e-publishing pioneers at that time meant converting desktop publishing files and HTML files into...
View ArticleCornell University Press Launches Open Access Program for Classic Books
Cornell University Press, the first university press in the United States, has been honored to receive an $83,635 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to make many of the classic,...
View Article“Online Publishing: Threat or Menace?” Redux
OBS founder and president Laura Fillmore recently revisited and updated this article she wrote over 20 years ago for The Journal of Electronic Publishing, and she would like to thank Editor Maria Bonn...
View ArticleApparent Rise in Print Book Sales is More a Trick than a Triumph
On December 21, book traditionalists celebrated an apparent increase in this year’s sales of printed books. But the 2% rise in sales reported by Nielsen BookScan – which constitutes a major success in...
View ArticleProcess Veritas: Need for Standards in Editorial/Production Workflows
How does a reader know that the text in hand or on screen contains true information? Back when I started my publishing career at Little, Brown/Trade Editorial in 1976, many independent publishing...
View ArticleOne World-Wide Webification
The big news to come out of BookExpo America (BEA) in Chicago this month is the early sounds of a merger of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), managers of the publishing industry’s EPUB...
View ArticleLOL RE: Kids, Cursive, and the Future of Communication
Public elementary schools appear to be eliminating the teaching of cursive writing. Early introduction to block letters today apparently only readies youngsters to recognize letters on a keyboard and...
View ArticleEnterprise Content Management: XML Spider on Steroids
We at OBS saw the XML spider approaching twenty years ago, and talked about it at the Summer Publishing Institute at the University of Virginia in 1997. Today, Enterprise Content Management systems are...
View ArticlePublishing Standards in an Open Source World: The W3C / IDPF Merger
On February 1, 2017, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) officially announced its merger with the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), stating in a press release that “the vision to align...
View ArticleAgile Hands in the Machine
As we trek along in the Human Machine Interface (HMI) – driving, texting, reading, recording – we inform our electronic environment, enabling it to grow smarter as it records our thought paths and...
View ArticleNet Neutrality: It’s Not Over Yet!
This past Saturday Senator Elizabeth Warren visited Cape Ann, where OBS is headquartered, for an inspiring town hall with 800 citizens. OBS president Laura Fillmore was the first to ask a question of...
View ArticleBezos Started Amazon Based on Math Error
Before Amazon, there was the Online BookStore (OBS), now Open Book Systems (OBS). We maintained a list of all the publishers who had online presences; it took up about half a computer screen in 1994....
View ArticleBEA Retrospective : Bounteous to Unbound
BEA has always been the book industry’s main show of the year in the US, when publishers release their Fall lists to the bookstores and libraries, offering advanced peeks at exciting new books in the...
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