BEA has always been the book industry’s main show of the year in the US, when publishers release their Fall lists to the bookstores and libraries, offering advanced peeks at exciting new books in the form of readings, advance galleys, and author breakfasts. Vendors to the trade used to enjoy a major presence at the →
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 →
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, →
This past Saturday Senator Elizabeth Warren visited Cape Ann, where OBS is headquartered, for an inspiring town hall with 800 citizens. OBS president Laura Fillmore was the first to ask a question of the Senator, and, fittingly, the internet pioneer asked about the FCC’s December 14 decision to eliminate Net Neutrality, basically turning the free and open →
As we trek along in the Human Machine Interface (HMI) – driving, texting, reading, recording – we inform our electronic environment, enabling it to grow smarter as it records our thought paths and virtual lives. We allow this thinking machine to sort, separate, sequence, map, aggregate, and otherwise contextualize our digital footprints with billions of others’ →
Poet John Ashbery died this past Sunday, stilling a genius voice whose insight and humor truly broke through to the other side. My husband introduced me to him in the 1970s. We read Houseboat Days aloud and laughed together at “The Serious Doll.” We were delighted when Ashbery accepted our invitation to come and give →
On February 1, 2017, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) officially announced its merger with the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), stating in a press release that “the vision to align Publishing and Web technologies and create a new roadmap for the future of publishing became official today.” A global standards organization that develops Web →
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 →
How does a reader know that the text in hand or on screen contains true information? Back when I started my publishing career at Little, Brown/Trade Editorial in 1976, many independent publishing houses dotted the landscape of a diverse industry. Readers could trust brands – we knew, for example, that Knopf cookbooks were top of →
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 →