content

We at OBS saw the XML spider approaching twenty years ago, and talked about it at the Summer Publishing Institute at the University of Virginia in 1997. Today, Enterprise Content Management systems are a multi-billion-dollar industry that’s growing at 15% per year.

XML-spider

Figure: “The XML Spider”: With a database of content tagged in XML, a publisher can code once and use many times, opening up new revenue streams through re-purposing their content. Please note: this is an archival document showing XML-centric workflow that was created by Laura Fillmore in 1997 as part of her presentations at the University of Virginia Summer Publishing Institute. It’s in need of updating!

A major instance of just such an update came recently with the Copyright Clearance Center’s acquisition of Ixxus, a publishing solutions provider. Together, the CCC and Ixxus are creating a revolutionary content management system that enables publishers to create a live hive of inter-operable content, chunked to the least common denominator. This “single source of truth” serves to centralize and standardize the publishing process, from file management to workflows to distribution and beyond. Pedagogical interface (PI), here we come!

 

 

 

 

One World-Wide Webification

The big news to come out of BookExpo America (BEA) in Chicago this month is the early sounds of a merger of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), managers of the publishing industry’s EPUB standard, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) and CEO →

< SIGH > There Goes My Job… Or Not

OBS once built a zesty Web interface for a school that enabled students to drop, click, aggregate, and otherwise customize and combine web-based content with their own. The system automated workflow which up till that point had existed on legal pads, hard drives, and in paper files. When we demo’ed the program to the school’s →

Yesterday’s Business: Managed Hosting

In the early days of the Internet, OBS used to not only design and develop internet solutions for publishers, but we also served as a managed host for the custom applications we built – keeping the system software environment and the applications updated, secure, and otherwise supported (customer and client support included!), all running behind →

It’s Easy as… PI

OBS is excited to be working with Common Ground’s new product Scholar — “a web writing space for learners of the social media generation” — to explore the dynamic interface where content (aka “books”) meets readers (“students”) and… things change. What used to be an essentially private act of reading and learning, led by a →

The Art of Programming: The Coder as Rock Star

A recent article in The New Yorker, “The Programmer’s Price,” described a new business model in the tech world: programmers are working with agents to find business opportunities and negotiate contracts.  This demonstrates a shift in how the tech world and other industries view programmers – no longer are they hired to sit in a →

Just Breathe: Publishers Build for the Future

Today’s rate of change is the slowest we will see in our lifetimes. In fact, now may be the first time we civilized humans live and work in an environment that is growing in size, breadth, and complexity, at an exponential rate of change. Thank you, Internet! The publishing conundrum : How to rapidly re-engineer →

Adobe’s New DRM: So Tight, Your eBook is Locked

Earlier this year, Adobe made a shocking announcement: with the July ’14 release of Adobe Digital Editions 3.0, and the attendant upgrade to its Digital Rights Management (DRM) encryption system, the majority of e-reader applications will no longer be able to read purchased eBooks. In layman’s terms, this means that the digital bookshelf you have →