publishing

Truth in Content: Codifying Publishing Workflows in the Digital Age

As a member of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)‘s Workflow Committee, OBS’s Laura Fillmore contributed to the recent White Paper on standardizing publishing workflows: “Fixing the Flux: Challenges and Opportunities in Publishing Workflows.” Where medical doctors have “Grey’s Anatomy” to refer to as a core reference resource for human anatomy, publishing professionals have no one →

OBS at Frankfurt Book Fair 2019

OBS is back again at the Frankfurt Book Fair again this October, ready to hit the ground running, exploring, and discovering digital publishing innovations and ideas for our clients and partners. One exciting initiative we are exploring is how blockchain networks can be put to use to update and streamline traditional publishing processes. The combination →

BEA Retrospective : Bounteous to Unbound

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 →

Trade Duty: Publishing What Ought to be Read

Many decision points contribute to a trade editor’s GO/NO GO final opinion. A bestseller will generate revenue to keep the doors open and the firm able to further its mission. A mid-list winner fills an ongoing content need and will keep selling and selling, slow and steady. In these POD days, when the words “out →

Freedom of the Press: The Front Line

OBS applauds Macmillan Publishers for actively defending our First Amendment rights in publishing Michael Woolf’s controversial book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.” Rather than bowing to White House demands that Macmillan cease and desist from publishing the book, which offers insights into the current administration’s White House, Macmillan subsidiary Henry Holt and Co. pushed →

Agile Hands in the Machine

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’ →

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 →