What’s New

Massachusetts New Software Services Tax

On July 31, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed a bill that established a sales tax of 6.25% on all software services offered in the state. Among the few states in the U.S. that have taxable computer services, the Massachusetts tax is by far the highest – New Mexico’s tax is 5.125%, Hawaii and South Dakota

We’re Moving!

After 20+ years in the same building, OBS is relocating to a new office! We are very excited about our new space in beautiful downtown Rockport. And while moving isn’t exactly a breeze – especially when you’ve got decades of publishing and internet history to sort through – we made things a little easier on

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

Corporate Content Grab: The Elsevier Edition

Just weeks after Amazon’s highly controversial acquisition of GoodReads, major scientific publisher Elsevier has pulled a similar content grab by purchasing Mendeley, a cloud-based social media platform featuring open source content provided by academics. A detailed summary of the argument against Elsevier’s recent acquisition can be found at The Cost of Knowledge, but essentially, academics

Foreign Rights Not Foreign Anymore

And the walls come tumbling down! As reported this week in Publishers Weekly, the Supreme Court handed copyright holders and publishers a global market haircut by limiting control over intellectual property to the first sale only. Turns out, an entrepreneurial student CAN import cheap textbooks from overseas and undercut the publisher’s sales of that same