What’s New

interRAI Pioneers New Medical Publishing Model

The interRAI organization, a nonprofit founded in 1994, serves geriatric and disabled populations around the world with their health care instruments for evaluation and assessment of health care. OBS puts our publishing expertise to work in helping populate and manage their internet portal for the new suite of 15 medical publications — manuals and forms for each

Pedagogical Interface (PI)

It seems to me that a Pedagogical Interface (PI) will prove to be a primary outcome of online publishing. Since the 1990s, publishers have gotten very good at using the internet as an infinite library of digits, a gigantic distribution pipe with a cash register at every possible outlet, an immediate means to access everyone

Indies and the Human Interface

I attended my first New England Independent Booksellers (NEIBA) conference in Hartford the other weekend, where many participants bemoaned the drop in the number of attendees. Some said the show used to be twice as big, say ten years ago, when there were many more independent bookstores. Apparently it was much more vital then, before

Google Settlement Causes International Ruckus

“Americans shoot first, ask questions later,” said the moderator of one panel discussion on the Google settlement held at this week’s Frankfurt Book Fair, reflecting widespread sentiment among non-US-based publishers and agents. “You Americans are all asleep,” noted one agent to me. “Why are you allowing this takeover of the publishing industry by a .com

Patronage the New Business Model?

A LinkedIn blogger asked: Is the book publishing business model so broken that we need patrons to subsidize our work? ( see http://is.gd/BNkV ) Patronage is one way to do it, but, as with advertising in books, if you follow the money, you may well find that the lucre influences the content, and compromises objectivity.

What Amazon’s New Foray into Publishing Means

Recently on LinkedIn, a publisher posed the question: What can we learn from Amazon’ s foray further into book publishing http://is.gd/Aawt and their attempt to allow bloggers to monetize their blogs by publishing them on Kindle http://is.gd/zOoF ? To which I responded: Amazon is in a great position to become a publisher now, situated as

Who needs Web 2.0?

I found this fascinating quote today: I’ve given a few talks on why these new tools are failing to catch on — here’s an early one given at a publishers meeting, and a later one given to an audience of scientists.  The short answer, if you don’t want to read my lengthy posts, is that very few,

London Focus: Protean Press Expands

In April, OBS and its subsidiary Protean Press will attend the London Book Fair with the goal to seek out publishing partners for new Protean Press titles. We will be: Selling paperback, foreign, and other sub rights and licenses to Joe Garland’s “Unknown Soldiers: Reliving World War II in Europe,” which has been published to