Rockport, Massachusetts, March 13, 2020 – Open Book Systems, Inc. continues to monitor the COVID-19 situation closely and is taking appropriate measures to ensure the health and safety of our employees and their families, as well as continuing to offer uninterrupted service to our customers. Since Tuesday, March 10, our staff and vendors are working →
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 →
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, →
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 →
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 →
Since its founding in 1982, OBS has been a thought leader and an innovator in the digital publishing space. The pace continues, 32 years later: OBS president and founder Laura Fillmore will be presenting on Agile Methodology and Change Management this November at the 12th International Conference on Books, Publishing, and Libraries. Agile methodology started →
Last week, French novelist Patrick Modiano was announced as the 2014 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. His publisher David Godine was pleasantly surprised, though he knows the feeling: another French writer and client of Godine’s, J.M.G. Le Clezio, won the coveted award in 2008. Part of Godine’s surprise is the fact that Modiano →
From October 8-12, OBS president Laura Fillmore will be attending the Frankfurt Book Fair in Frankfurt, Germany. A major conference in the publishing industry, last year’s Fair hosted over 7,000 exhibitors from over 100 nations; more than 9,000 journalists; and hundreds of thousands of visitors. One of the hot topics at this year’s Fair is →
We saw the e-wave coming over thirty years ago and are working today to help publishers adapt to and profit from new internet-based publishing opportunities. Read the below excerpt from a “What’s New” OBS posted over ten years ago; you will see that OBS has a strong working knowledge not only of the traditional publishing →