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 houses dotted the landscape of a diverse industry. Readers could trust brands – we knew, for example, that Knopf cookbooks were top of →
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 →
We were surprised to see in the Express Tribune/International New York Times recently that some folks, like Shopify, think that the first ecommerce transaction on the internet happened in 1994. We at OBS need to correct the record, and note that Open Book Systems (which was Online BookStore back then) actually sold the first online →
Talk about the publishing cycle, long-form! Last fall, Margaret Atwood delivered her new novel “Scribbler Moon” to the Future Library Project (http://www.futurelibrary.no/), to be read in 100 years after it is printed on some of the thousand tiny new trees that the project has just planted in the forest outside of Oslo, Norway, home of →
The Journal of Electronic Publishing contacted us recently, looking for an update to a paper about online publishing I wrote and presented in 1993, and which this Michigan journal published 20 years ago. Also presenting on the same panel with me at that the Graphics Communication Association Online Publishing Conference was Tim Berners-Lee, showing slides →
Dr. Vint Cerf’s keynote at the AAUP Annual Meeting underlined the criticality of digital preservation, noting how vulnerable our civilization has become as we race to the cloud, no strategy in place to preserve the recorded thoughts, ideas, art and information that we all generate, and which we’ve inherited from generations past. Our collective preservation →
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 plain ASCII, to render their content machine-readable, thus offering disabled readers the “full and equal enjoyment” of their content, as well as the “effective →
OBS once built a zesty Web interface for a school that enabled students to drop, click, aggregate, and otherwise customize and combine web-based content with their own. The system automated workflow which up till that point had existed on legal pads, hard drives, and in paper files. When we demo’ed the program to the school’s →
Looking forward to the London Book Fair in two weeks, and especially the Research and Scholarly Forum. In our 30+ years of e-publishing experience, it seems like the real innovations come out of the STM space. That may be because scientists seek to discover or uncover the truth as they publish. Scientists tend to stretch →
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”) meets readers (“students”) and… things change. What used to be an essentially private act of reading and learning, led by a →