publisher

Your Electronic Medical Record (EMR): a Customized Resource for Your Health Needs

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 →

Freedom of the Press: The Front Line

OBS applauds Macmillan Publishers for actively defending our First Amendment rights in publishing Michael Woolf’s controversial book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.” Rather than bowing to White House demands that Macmillan cease and desist from publishing the book, which offers insights into the current administration’s White House, Macmillan subsidiary Henry Holt and Co. pushed →

Agile Hands in the Machine

As we trek along in the Human Machine Interface (HMI) – driving, texting, reading, recording – we inform our electronic environment, enabling it to grow smarter as it records our thought paths and virtual lives. We allow this thinking machine to sort, separate, sequence, map, aggregate, and otherwise contextualize our digital footprints with billions of others’ →

OBS’s Protean Press Publishes New, Comprehensive Scholarship on Domenico Scarlatti

In 2007, Christopher Hail began to contribute to the scholarly research on the work of Domenico Scarlatti by authoring an erudite, witty, and successful website dedicated to the Italian composer. He contributed to it daily, until his death in 2014. Given the relevance of Hail’s research, his family estate resolved to publish the content of →

We at OBS saw the XML spider approaching twenty years ago, and talked about it at the Summer Publishing Institute at the University of Virginia in 1997. Today, Enterprise Content Management systems are a multi-billion-dollar industry that’s growing at 15% per year.

Figure: “The XML Spider”: With a database of content tagged in XML, a publisher can code once and use many times, opening up new revenue streams through re-purposing their content. Please note: this is an archival document showing XML-centric workflow that was created by Laura Fillmore in 1997 as part of her presentations at the University of Virginia Summer Publishing Institute. It’s in need of updating!

A major instance of just such an update came recently with the Copyright Clearance Center’s acquisition of Ixxus, a publishing solutions provider. Together, the CCC and Ixxus are creating a revolutionary content management system that enables publishers to create a live hive of inter-operable content, chunked to the least common denominator. This “single source of truth” serves to centralize and standardize the publishing process, from file management to workflows to distribution and beyond. Pedagogical interface (PI), here we come!

One World-Wide Webification

The big news to come out of BookExpo America (BEA) in Chicago this month is the early sounds of a merger of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), managers of the publishing industry’s EPUB standard, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) and CEO →

Apparent Rise in Print Book Sales is More a Trick than a Triumph

On December 21, book traditionalists celebrated an apparent increase in this year’s sales of printed books. But the 2% rise in sales reported by Nielsen BookScan – which constitutes a major success in the foundering book industry – unfortunately has more to do with adult coloring books and ebook price negotiations than it does with →

“Stories From the Shadows” Sheds Light

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 →

< SIGH > There Goes My Job… Or Not

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 →

The Art of Programming: The Coder as Rock Star

A recent article in The New Yorker, “The Programmer’s Price,” described a new business model in the tech world: programmers are working with agents to find business opportunities and negotiate contracts. This demonstrates a shift in how the tech world and other industries view programmers – no longer are they hired to sit in a →