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, →
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 →
Dr. Vint Cerf’s keynote at the AAUP Annual Meeting underlined the criticality of digital preservation, noting how vulnerable our civilization has become as we race to the cloud, no strategy in place to preserve the recorded thoughts, ideas, art and information that we all generate, and which we’ve inherited from generations past. Our collective preservation →
When the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was introduced in 1990, compliance for the hearty band of e-publishing pioneers at that time meant converting desktop publishing files and HTML files into plain ASCII, to render their content machine-readable, thus offering disabled readers the “full and equal enjoyment” of their content, as well as the “effective →
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 →
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 →
At first glance, the OBS Archives Site appears to be an outdated list of hyperlinks with layout and formatting reminiscent of the early 1990s. At that time, Mosaic browsers and hyperlinks were completely reforming our ideas about creating and sharing information. The Internet was just entering into the public consciousness. The world was changing, and →