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 →
“End of an era!“ writes a colleague from London when the news hit: https://publishingperspectives.com/2020/12/reedpop-cancels-new-yorks-bookexpo-bookcon-retiring-the-event-permanently-covid19/ “No more dinners, dancing, or fun, ever again, anywhere, any more…” “Oh, sad,” I responded. “What times we’ve had!” I remember the BEA show in Miami in 1994, the heady elation after the first day of our Internet Start-up Booth. It →
May 5, 2020 OBS posts these CDC guidelines as a public service, as Massachusetts and other states and localities consider reopening their economies while COVID-19 remains at large in our communities. CDC submitted to White House (downloaded from San Jose Mercury News) Interim Guidance for Child Care Programs The reopening of child care programs is →
May Day! It’s May Day! We have three options to celebrate this day: a joyful, youthful celebration and dance; a protest of the masses against the elite; or a desperate cry for help. This pandemic year, it looks like all three types of May Day celebration were in order for the publishing industry. Remember the →
OBS is back again at the Frankfurt Book Fair again this October, ready to hit the ground running, exploring, and discovering digital publishing innovations and ideas for our clients and partners. One exciting initiative we are exploring is how blockchain networks can be put to use to update and streamline traditional publishing processes. The combination →
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 →
As things speed up to such an extent that there remains no time any more to muse, ponder, discuss, cogitate, and write things down, the old adage that the pen is mightier than the sword appears to be morphing into “the phone is mightier than the sword.” Witness the recent rise of live streaming as →
Back in the Paleolithic Age of Paper, information moved slowly. Slow like the Glyptodon. Books took nine months to gestate from manuscript to print. For content to reach readers beyond the market of origin, the Sub Rights Director at Publisher #1 (the primary publisher) would sell foreign rights (one of multiple “sub” rights, including serial rights, TV →
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 →