As things speed up to such an extent that there remains no time any more to muse, ponder, discuss, cogitate, and write things down, the old adage that the pen is mightier than the sword appears to be morphing into “the phone is mightier than the sword.” Witness the recent rise of live streaming as →
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 →
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 →
Since the dawn of the Kindle and the consequent boom in ebook sales, it has appeared that the days of traditional print books are numbered. As technology evolves and the e-reader market expands to include more devices – perhaps most notably, the iPad – more and more consumers seem to be making the switch from →
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 →