Cleaning out my office this August, I came across the typescript of a book proposal, “The Secret Ending of World War II: How Nazism Survived to Fight Another Day,” submitted to me in 1990 by Carl Oglesby, and never published. OBS has been offering publishing services since 1982; decades of work leave a long trail of →
We are beginning to experiment with two book projects that leverage blockchain technology to track users’ ownership of ebooks. We were attracted to the blockchain because it appears to address issues fundamental to the publishing industry — such as, for example, what it means to “own” a digital object like an ebook — while also moving us →
When a publication gets empowered by blockchain technology, one can truly say that a reader never steps into the same book twice. Blockchain enables internet-published content to emulate life itself — both the perceived (the content), and the perceivers (publishers and readers) — in a recorded environment that captures and publishes a constant state of content →
“The Connection” NPR Host Christopher Lydon, MIT Media Lab Music Professor Tod Machover, and Laura Fillmore, President of the Online BookStore (OBS) explore the future of arts on the net in this radio show — Karaoke books, interactive opera, hyper books and instruments. We began to travel down thought trails leading into the new frontier, a →
Before Amazon, there was the Online BookStore (OBS), now Open Book Systems (OBS). We maintained a list of all the publishers who had online presences; it took up about half a computer screen in 1994. Before starting the Online BookStore, our company packaged books for publishers, one of which was John Quarterman’s The Matrix (Digital Press, →
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 →
This past Saturday Senator Elizabeth Warren visited Cape Ann, where OBS is headquartered, for an inspiring town hall with 800 citizens. OBS president Laura Fillmore was the first to ask a question of the Senator, and, fittingly, the internet pioneer asked about the FCC’s December 14 decision to eliminate Net Neutrality, basically turning the free and open →
Meme Machinery 101: The Evolution of a University Press Marketplace” by Laura Fillmore President, Open Book Systems (OBS) Presented to AAUP Annual Meeting at Snowbird May 24, 1996 Excerpted from http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/papers/mememach.htm Copyright © 1996 by Laura Fillmore; written permission required to reprint. Coming back to the Wasatch mountains at Snowbird is a welcome pilgrimage for →
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’ →
Come gather round the fireplace for a few minutes, with some of the folks from Brooklyn College, to celebrate in a few short readings some banned books I bet we’ve all read….