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, out-of-print books in its archive available online for free. This grant is among the first awarded by the Humanities Open Book Program, →
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 →
This Veterans’ Day, we honor Joe Garland, his service to his country during World War II in the 45th Infantry Division, and his service to his fellow soldiers and readers back home in the publication of his collective memoir: “Unknown Soldiers: Reliving World War II in Europe.” We miss you, Joe!
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 →
Helping “grey” (nontraditional) publishers produce books and succeed in the market is an exciting part of what OBS does, so it gives us great pleasure to see a Boston organization, whose mission we so admire, emerge into the world of publishing. Celebrating 30 years of continuous care of Boston’s homeless population, “Stories From the Shadows: Reflections of a →
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 →
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 system software environment and the applications updated, secure, and otherwise supported (customer and client support included!), all running behind →