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“Long Time Passing”: Herrick brings Vietnam to Rockport

Our business at Open Book Systems, Inc., focuses largely on internet-based publishing solutions for companies and nonprofits. But every now and again, we return to our roots in traditional book publishing in support of extraordinary projects. Author John Herrick found OBS president Laura Fillmore thanks to an acknowledgement author Joe Garland made to her in

Plain Speak: When Simplicity Speaks Louder than Legalese

The other day I signed a third-party agreement to back up to the cloud our document repository. Functionality: kind of ho-hum, routine, and back-end. Cost: about $200 per year. However, the agreement took weeks to negotiate and ended up being over 30 pages of gobbledygook legalese, replete with WHEREASes and disclaimers and tangled prose. By

Pennies for a Press Release

We recently test drove ChatGPT on writing a press release for a new medical book, an assignment that, during the pen-centric era of prose, would have taken a professional medical copywriter a few hours and cost several hundred dollars. As food for “thought,” we fed the AI algorithm the Table of Contents, chapter abstracts, first

The Peace Bell Warrior Story

How Chiyoji Nakagawa Became a Soldier for Peace and Changed the World This is a transcript of a story told by Nakagawa’s daughter, Seiko Takase (Representative Director, Association for the Preservation of the UN Peace Bell), on a Zoom call held on behalf of the Earth Society Foundation, of which OBS President Laura Fillmore is

Publishing Peace: U.S. Can Lead by Example

As nations supporting Ukrainian resistance hurry to deliver military weaponry to the front, and as volunteer soldiers join the fray from around the world, promising to defend democracy by fighting fire with fire, the nuclear nations of the world — specifically the U.S. — have an unprecedented opportunity to practice peace, to try and change