Just in time for London Book Fair, OBS is celebrating the launch of our new e-distribution portal, ProtoBooks: Your one-stop shop for both print and ebooks. For publishers, ProtoBooks is a fast and secure way to get your books to the global market in a variety of formats:

• Subscription-based online access;
• Cloud-stored Flash-based ebooks;
• Downloads for offline reading;
• Worldwide Print-On-Demand and/or standard print distribution through OBS partner, the Harvard Book Store.

ProtoBooks provides publishers with sales and customer reports, so you know who’s buying your content and when—valuable information that most major e-tailers do not share. Interactive marketing widgets for each title allow readers to preview before buying and to share selections from your content via social networks. Our end-to-end solution gives publishers the opportunity to make their frontlist, backlist, or experimental new publications available worldwide in a low-risk environment –published in real time!

For consumers, ProtoBooks offers cloud-based online reading and download options for reading anywhere or on the go, with interactive features such as bookmarks and note-taking. Institutions can also subscribe to a publisher’s collection, allowing for entire classes or departments to read and share content and notes seamlessly. Also, with the Harvard Book Store and its Espresso Book Machine (EBM), readers can order physical copies of the books that are printed, bound, and ready to ship anywhere in the world within minutes.

Since the 1980s, OBS has been at the forefront of the publishing services industry. We launched the first online book store on the Internet in 1992 and have achieved lots of other “firsts” during our 30-year history. We hope that ProtoBooks will serve as an epublishing catalyst to enable our industry to engineer its content evolution.