Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has gained the support of state lawmakers in promising to repeal the newly-passed software services tax. Included in a transportation bill that was passed earlier this summer, the new law extends a 6.25% sales tax – the highest in the nation – to software and computer services, including website design and →
On July 31, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed a bill that established a sales tax of 6.25% on all software services offered in the state. Among the few states in the U.S. that have taxable computer services, the Massachusetts tax is by far the highest – New Mexico’s tax is 5.125%, Hawaii and South Dakota →
After 20+ years in the same building, OBS is relocating to a new office! We are very excited about our new space in beautiful downtown Rockport. And while moving isn’t exactly a breeze – especially when you’ve got decades of publishing and internet history to sort through – we made things a little easier on →
As OBS packs up and starts to move our offices across town to premises recently vacated by Rockport Music, we’re making great strides towards paperlessness. Manuscripts, contracts, bank statements, resumes – tens of thousands of sheets of paper! In the process of reading, packing, scanning, and discarding comes time for contemplation. The recent media fuss →
A recent partnership between ePublishing software company Impelsys and DataLore, Inc. turns digital publishing on its head. (…What else is new?) The two companies have partnered in order to offer customized, branded ebookstores to schools and universities across the Caribbean. But instead of customizing its software solutions to publishers – Impelsys’ epublishing platform iPublishCentral offers →
In light of all the flurry of activity these days around the (re)selling of intangible digits, we might be wise to re-think the focus of our predominant, copy-based business model. In an economy of scarcity with tangible artifacts like hardcovers, if I give you my book, my hands become empty. Alternatively, in an economy of →
These days, with the ubiquity of mobile devices, it seems like we are living inside a kind of Memex. First envisioned by technology pioneer Vannevar Bush after World War II, a Memex is “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications and which is mechanized so that it may be →
Just weeks after Amazon’s highly controversial acquisition of GoodReads, major scientific publisher Elsevier has pulled a similar content grab by purchasing Mendeley, a cloud-based social media platform featuring open source content provided by academics. A detailed summary of the argument against Elsevier’s recent acquisition can be found at The Cost of Knowledge, but essentially, academics →
With almost every innovation in the publishing industry comes a cry to save the independent book store from impending doom. In the 1930s, the big threat was the paperback. In the 1970s, it was mall chains like Waldenbooks and B. Dalton. Then it was Amazon. And now it’s the ebook. But just as the paperback →
And the walls come tumbling down! As reported this week in Publishers Weekly, the Supreme Court handed copyright holders and publishers a global market haircut by limiting control over intellectual property to the first sale only. Turns out, an entrepreneurial student CAN import cheap textbooks from overseas and undercut the publisher’s sales of that same →