Agile Methodology

Agile 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 virtual lives. We allow this thinking machine to sort, separate, sequence, map, aggregate, and otherwise contextualize our digital footprints with billions of others’

One 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 standard, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) and CEO

“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 at the University of Illinois for the invitation to do so. The internet has introduced so many radical changes in our publishing

Cloud Touting: A Moving Caution

As OBS packs up and starts to move our offices across town to premises recently vacated by Rockport Music, we’re making great strides towards paperlessness. Manuscripts, contracts, bank statements, resumes – tens of thousands of sheets of paper! In the process of reading, packing, scanning, and discarding comes time for contemplation. The recent media fuss

Game Changer: ePublishing Software in the Hands of the Consumer, not the Publisher

A recent partnership between ePublishing software company Impelsys and DataLore, Inc.  turns digital publishing on its head. (…What else is new?) The two companies have partnered in order to offer customized, branded ebookstores to schools and universities across the Caribbean. But instead of customizing its software solutions to publishers – Impelsys’ epublishing platform iPublishCentral offers

Is that a Memex in your Pocket?

These days, with the ubiquity of mobile devices, it seems like we are living inside a kind of Memex. First envisioned by technology pioneer Vannevar Bush after World War II, a Memex is “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications and which is mechanized so that it may be