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 →
No shadow falls between the delivery and the publication, no hiatus between the thought and the thing itself! Our author delivered to his publisher Backbeat Books (an imprint of Globe Pequot Press) the last of the photos in his art program on Sunday night, September 22, and on Monday, September 23, his new book, “What →
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 →
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 →
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 →
“The Connection” NPR Host Christopher Lydon, MIT Media Lab Music Professor Tod Machover, and Laura Fillmore, President of the Online BookStore (OBS) explore the future of arts on the net in this radio show — Karaoke books, interactive opera, hyper books and instruments. We began to travel down thought trails leading into the new frontier, a →
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, →
OBS applauds Macmillan Publishers for actively defending our First Amendment rights in publishing Michael Woolf’s controversial book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.” Rather than bowing to White House demands that Macmillan cease and desist from publishing the book, which offers insights into the current administration’s White House, Macmillan subsidiary Henry Holt and Co. pushed →