Anne C. Wyman, once the Boston Globe’s first full-time travel writer and long-time editorial page editor, in 2010 asked OBS’s Protean Press to publish her book “Kiping’s Cat: A Memoir of my Father.” Over the years, this publishing project grew into four Wyman books, two of them posthumous publications by Anne’s father himself, Jeffries Wyman. →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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, →
Public elementary schools appear to be eliminating the teaching of cursive writing. Early introduction to block letters today apparently only readies youngsters to recognize letters on a keyboard and begin typing ASAP, thumbing in texts and tweets on screens, rather than serving as a precursor to learning cursive writing as a primary means of documentation →
OBS founder and president Laura Fillmore recently revisited and updated this article she wrote over 20 years ago for The Journal of Electronic Publishing, and she would like to thank Editor Maria Bonn at the University of Illinois for the invitation to do so. The internet has introduced so many radical changes in our publishing →
We were surprised to see in the Express Tribune/International New York Times recently that some folks, like Shopify, think that the first ecommerce transaction on the internet happened in 1994. We at OBS need to correct the record, and note that Open Book Systems (which was Online BookStore back then) actually sold the first online →
This Veterans’ Day, we honor Joe Garland, his service to his country during World War II in the 45th Infantry Division, and his service to his fellow soldiers and readers back home in the publication of his collective memoir: “Unknown Soldiers: Reliving World War II in Europe.” We miss you, Joe!