Greetings from the OBS

Greetings from the OBS!

Online BookStore (OBS) Ltd.
Whistlestop Mall, Rockport, MA 01966
http://www.obs-us.com/
obs@obs-us.com
Voice 978-546-7346 Fax 978-546-9807

Welcome to the Online BookStore (OBS)! Here, we make online books and ideas available to people worldwide, with the goal of exploring and helping to define the new business of thinking publicly in the distributive, recorded environment of the Internet. Not a bookstore in a traditional sense, you will find that OBS uses the medium to enhance our role as facilitators in the evolution of online recorded thought, or "online publishing," in the following ways:

As a publisher's publisher, an important aspect of our business involves developing books to complement printed books, from initial concept on through to the coding and siting of files. Our publishing services also include our new Cyberdock program.
As a bookstore, OBS satisfies our readers' needs by offering lots of opportunity to sample free texts online, and by networking with terrestrial bookstores to fill orders for hard copies of books.
As a literary agency, we connect authors to publishers, specifically in the subject area of cyberbooks.
As authors, teachers, and public speakers, OBS people regularly talk and write publicly about the computer issues which define our lives and business.

Working in all of the above areas keeps OBS responsive to our clients' needs, and alive to the changing possibilities of publishing on the Internet.

A New Concept: HOW OBS BEGAN
The Online BookStore (OBS) started when we got impatient waiting for our book, The Internet Companion: A Beginner's Guide to Global Networking by Tracy LaQuey (Addison-Wesley, 1992), to arrive from the printer. It was the first general trade book about the Internet, so to get the word out, in December, 1992 we posted ASCII files of Chapter One free for anonymous FTP. Thousands of people responded; many asked "What's the next book?" At that point, we began to look at Internet publishing as a viable supplement to the publishing services business we had been involved in since 1982. And we made the leap from paper to electrons.

Since then, OBS has grown to include many new titles, from publishers big and small. In a continuing effort to enable the ideas within books, and the readers of those books, to best gain from the dynamic online medium, we customize our strategy for each publication, based on the content of the book and the needs of the readers. We aren't making "cookie-cutter books" where every posting follows the same format. As you see in the Tour of the Store, our approach to online publishing reflects both the dynamic state of the Internet as a publishing medium, and the individual contents of each book.

This customization process has led us into the fields of teaching, writing, and consulting, but throughout all, the focus remains consistent: OBS's goal is to identify, facilitate and develop the customized access to ideas and information which is the new terrain of online publishing. Towards that goal, we rely on reader participation in our site, and therefore welcome you to the process that is the OBS.

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