Reading Aloud During Banned Books Week
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….
Author Archives: OBS
Ginsberg “Hum Bom!” Resurrected from OBS Archive
To help us prepare for the news of the day, we leaf a few page back to Allen Ginsberg’s Hum Bom! Our 1994 offer from the Archives still stands, of course, and the show will go on, though the email address has changed. If you read aloud some or all of Ginsberg’s poem and record →
John Ashbery: In Memoriam
Poet John Ashbery died this past Sunday, stilling a genius voice whose insight and humor truly broke through to the other side. My husband introduced me to him in the 1970s. We read Houseboat Days aloud and laughed together at “The Serious Doll.” We were delighted when Ashbery accepted our invitation to come and give →
Free Speech Matters
During these challenging times, some may find it tempting to try and purge the online environment of propaganda and hate speech — but we must not succumb to the siren song of censorship, whose blade, given time, cuts equally right, left, or center. Danger signs manifest themselves today — some gatekeepers of our internet infrastructure →
Standing up for Net Neutrality
Since we saw the first posts on USENET in Spring 1989, describing the protests in Tiananmen Square, and the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, OBS has built a publishing services business based on a free and open internet. Censorship (in the form of suppression and distortion of free speech) is raising its ugly head once →
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 →
Publishing Standards in an Open Source World: The W3C / IDPF Merger
On February 1, 2017, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) officially announced its merger with the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), stating in a press release that “the vision to align Publishing and Web technologies and create a new roadmap for the future of publishing became official today.” A global standards organization that develops Web →
IDPF/W3C Merger Seen as Threat to Industry
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 →
Wisdom to our Electors, From the Source
What’s New today, and critical for us to understand before the Electoral College votes next month, is a document from 1788: The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton designed the Electoral College to ensure that “… the election of the President is pretty well guarded.” The College’s 538 Electors come from outside of Federal Government, →
Happy 25th, WWW!
Tim Berners-Lee launched the world’s first web site two and a half decades ago, and suddenly, incrementally, bit by bit, we all became… something else! It’s been quite a ride, as we have externalized and collectivized our thinking and living processes, converging online, becoming the hive mind. Grateful to TB-L for starting the blaze — →