The Journal of Electronic Publishing contacted us recently, looking for an update to a paper about online publishing I wrote and presented in 1993, and which this Michigan journal published 20 years ago. Also presenting on the same panel with me at that the Graphics Communication Association Online Publishing Conference was Tim Berners-Lee, showing slides →
Dr. Vint Cerf’s keynote at the AAUP Annual Meeting underlined the criticality of digital preservation, noting how vulnerable our civilization has become as we race to the cloud, no strategy in place to preserve the recorded thoughts, ideas, art and information that we all generate, and which we’ve inherited from generations past. Our collective preservation →
When the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was introduced in 1990, compliance for the hearty band of e-publishing pioneers at that time meant converting desktop publishing files and HTML files into plain ASCII, to render their content machine-readable, thus offering disabled readers the “full and equal enjoyment” of their content, as well as the “effective →
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 →
In the early days of the Internet, OBS used to not only design and develop internet solutions for publishers, but we also served as a managed host for the custom applications we built – keeping the system software environment and the applications updated, secure, and otherwise supported (customer and client support included!), all running behind →
Having traveled the world as a publishing innovator and leader, OBS president Laura Fillmore is no stranger to hopping the pond. That said, she is very much looking forward to attending the London Book Fair this month — especially the Research and Scholarly Forum. The London Book Fair is one of the world’s largest and most influential publishing conferences, and is →
Looking forward to the London Book Fair in two weeks, and especially the Research and Scholarly Forum. In our 30+ years of e-publishing experience, it seems like the real innovations come out of the STM space. That may be because scientists seek to discover or uncover the truth as they publish. Scientists tend to stretch →
OBS is excited to be working with Common Ground’s new product Scholar — “a web writing space for learners of the social media generation” — to explore the dynamic interface where content (aka “books”) meets readers (“students”) and… things change. What used to be an essentially private act of reading and learning, led by a →
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 the dawn of the Kindle and the consequent boom in ebook sales, it has appeared that the days of traditional print books are numbered. As technology evolves and the e-reader market expands to include more devices – perhaps most notably, the iPad – more and more consumers seem to be making the switch from →