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 →
Many decision points contribute to a trade editor’s GO/NO GO final opinion. A bestseller will generate revenue to keep the doors open and the firm able to further its mission. A mid-list winner fills an ongoing content need and will keep selling and selling, slow and steady. In these POD days, when the words “out →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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, →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →