As a member of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)‘s Workflow Committee, OBS’s Laura Fillmore contributed to the recent White Paper on standardizing publishing workflows: “Fixing the Flux: Challenges and Opportunities in Publishing Workflows.” Where medical doctors have “Grey’s Anatomy” to refer to as a core reference resource for human anatomy, publishing professionals have no one →
Anne C. Wyman, once the Boston Globe’s first full-time travel writer and long-time editorial page editor, in 2010 asked OBS’s Protean Press to publish her book “Kiping’s Cat: A Memoir of my Father.” Over the years, this publishing project grew into four Wyman books, two of them posthumous publications by Anne’s father himself, Jeffries Wyman. →
Just back from the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual meeting, where we witnessed and participated in an AI-enabled, transformative merger of humans, health care, and publishing. Here’s a hypothetical: Say you visit your GP after a fall on the ice, because of sharp pain in your side. Bruised ribs? Broken? Instead of →
An Open Letter from Fran Toolan about the IDPF/W3C merger Friends, I am writing to you today to update you on an important issue that has the potential to undermine the success of the eBook industry. As many of you already know, the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) is finalizing its plans to “merge” with →
We have been working with a medical colleague in Brussels to develop controlled vocabulary for a suite of medical instruments, to facilitate the gathering and interpretation of patient data in multiple languages. This nonprofit volunteer organization focuses on saving lives, improving the quality of medical care across cultures. How perfect a petri dish is trilingual →
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 →
Published in the IPNE Newsletter – June 2010 Back when BookExpo America (BEA) was the American Booksellers Association (ABA) Convention and Trade Exhibit, this was the biggest, most lavish book conference in the country, where the publishers introduced their fall lists to the bookstores. Filled with marketing hype, lavish parties by wholesalers and distributors like Ingram and B&T, private →