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 →
Since its founding in 1982, OBS has been a thought leader and an innovator in the digital publishing space. The pace continues, 32 years later: OBS president and founder Laura Fillmore will be presenting on Agile Methodology and Change Management this November at the 12th International Conference on Books, Publishing, and Libraries. Agile methodology started →
Tom Kabinet, the controversial online marketplace for used ebooks, has won the first (albeit small) battle in what promises to be a long war regarding the resale of digital files. Tom Kabinet received its first legal notice from the Dutch Trade Publishers Association just 8 days after the site went live; now, only one month →
A debate is raging in the publishing industry about whether the selling of secondhand ebooks is legal. One startup isn’t waiting for the dust to settle. Tom Kabinet.nl is an online marketplace for used ebooks that essentially acts as a liaison between buyers and sellers: it processes credit cards (for a fee), and oversees the →
Back in 1989, when we published the first trade book about the internet, “The Internet Companion,” our publisher Addison Wesley sold the foreign rights to other trade publishers. We got a lump sum payment for these rights deals, and about a year later would receive some free copies of exotic books — in Polish! Japanese! →
Today’s rate of change is the slowest we will see in our lifetimes. In fact, now may be the first time we civilized humans live and work in an environment that is growing in size, breadth, and complexity, at an exponential rate of change. Thank you, Internet! The publishing conundrum : How to rapidly re-engineer →
As OBS packs up and starts to move our offices across town to premises recently vacated by Rockport Music, we’re making great strides towards paperlessness. Manuscripts, contracts, bank statements, resumes – tens of thousands of sheets of paper! In the process of reading, packing, scanning, and discarding comes time for contemplation. The recent media fuss →
A recent partnership between ePublishing software company Impelsys and DataLore, Inc. turns digital publishing on its head. (…What else is new?) The two companies have partnered in order to offer customized, branded ebookstores to schools and universities across the Caribbean. But instead of customizing its software solutions to publishers – Impelsys’ epublishing platform iPublishCentral offers →
In light of all the flurry of activity these days around the (re)selling of intangible digits, we might be wise to re-think the focus of our predominant, copy-based business model. In an economy of scarcity with tangible artifacts like hardcovers, if I give you my book, my hands become empty. Alternatively, in an economy of →
These days, with the ubiquity of mobile devices, it seems like we are living inside a kind of Memex. First envisioned by technology pioneer Vannevar Bush after World War II, a Memex is “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications and which is mechanized so that it may be →