OBS Firsts: Leading the Online Publishing Industry Since 1989
Open Book Systems (OBS) is responsible for a startling number of industry "firsts" in Internet publishing. Now, as we develop generated sites and discover the "market of one" offered by the Internet, OBS again takes the lead.
Follow the history of online publishing by reviewing the OBS "Firsts":
OBS takes pride in putting our clients first. We balance creativity with technical expertise to assist our clients in developing web sites that work.
- How OBS Began
- 1989 -- OBS/Editorial Inc. produces John Quarterman's The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide for Digital Press, the first book about the Internet.
- 1992 -- Editorial Inc. conceives of and produces The Internet Companion: A Beginner's Guide to Global Networking by Tracy LaQuey (Addison-Wesley), the first trade book about the Internet. Online BookStore (OBS) is launched.
- March 15, 1993 -- OBS sponsors the first "Live Online" poetry reading on the Net, featuring National Book Award-winner Robert Coover, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Ashbery.
- March 1993 -- The Voyager version of The Internet Companion becomes first disk-based trade book to contain Internet Service Provider connectivity software.
- May 1993 -- OBS Internet Start-Up Booth brings the first Internet connection to ABA.
- September 1993 -- OBS publishes Stephen King on the Net and conducts the first sale of Internet rights. The gopher "buy" option offering immediate credit card clearance was the first of its kind on the Net.
- October 1993 -- OBS brings the first Internet connection to Frankfurt Book Fair.
- February 1994 -- OBS sells the first "distributive" book in HTML on the Net, Adrian Butash's Bless This Food (Delacorte Press).
- March 1994 -- OBS conducts the first "Virtual Book Signing" on the Net with Viking Penguin.
- May 1994 -- John Wiley publishes its first titles on the Net with OBS.
- May 1994 -- Bernice Chesler's Bed & Breakfast in New England, 4th edition (Globe Pequot Press) becomes the first B&B book on the Web.
- September 30, 1994 -- McGraw-Hill publishes the complete HTML files for Paperless Publishing with OBS.
- October 2, 1994 -- Floyd Kemske (Catbird Press) becomes the first novelist to publish the complete book-writing process on the Web, paving the way for hyperfictions online.
- December 14, 1994 -- Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom published in multiple languages on the Net.
- February 1995 -- OBS introduces multilanguage publishing server (in four languages).
- June 1, 1995 -- OBS offers "Time Warner Quick Reads" for sale by download - a first for Time Warner Electronic Publishing. (The Quick Reads are now Out of Print and no longer available for download and purchase!)
- October 26, 1995 -- OBS creates the first "Open Book Review" for Robert McNamara's In Retrospect.
- November, 1995 -- OBS creates award-winning film-sites for Miramax-Films.
- March 1996 -- First the posting of a trilingual search engine for McKinley.com (now Excite!).
- March 17, 1996 -- Bernice Chesler's Bed and Breakfast in New England, 5th edition (Chronicle Books) becomes the first full-text, fully-searchable database B&B book on the Net, offering online currency conversion, weather reports, interactive maps, and email to 448 selected B&Bs.
- May 1996 -- Springhouse Corporation, the country's leading nursing publisher (subsidiary of Reed Elsevier) offers the first Continuing Education Credits online over the Internet through OBS.
- July 1996 Gordon and Breach site serves as an "author magnet" by enabling online submission and accellerated publication of content.
- October 1996 -- OBS hosts the world's first Internet Rights Auction for the Frankfurt Book Fair auctioning off the Internet rights to two titles by Gregory Rawlins and Maeve Binchy.
- December 1996 -- Multiple choice tests are graded and charged for in real-time at the Springhouse Corporation's SpringNet.com site.
- January 1998 -- OBS develops backend software which enables our clients to offer variable discounts to online CE test-takers (see http://www.springnet.com/ce/cesaver.htm), beginning to approach the Internet's toted "Market of One."
- February 1998 -- Customizing online CEs beyond real-time web application, OBS programs and implements "contained CE's", which enable the OBS-developed, self-correcting web tests to run on clients' own environments (LANs and Intranets running on NT and UNIX systems), using the Internet as an updating and reporting medium.
- February 1998 -- OBS teams up with Yankee Rights Management to develop "Of-Course.com," an online multi-publisher database using Digital Object Identifier (DOI) capabilities that will seek to expand the user base for medical content.
- March 1998 -- The Exeter Academy home page conveys its sense of place - live on line.
- July 1998 -- OBS introduces the NavWheel© with the Gordon & Breach journal "Addiction Research" as a new way to navigate through a scholarly article from multiple points of view -- potentially expanding the audience group well beyond academic circles.
- September 1998 -- The Lawrenceville School posts its first generated site - updated daily by administrators and faculty.