WebMaster, February 1997
"Making Book""Laura Fillmore, president and CEO of Open Book Systems Ltd. ...., has always been impatient with an online publishing model that echoes the print version, and now she's pushing her ideas even further."
"Fillmore's latest effort is the world's first Internet Rights Auction, held at the 48th Frankfurt Book Fair in October 1996."
"Unlike most rights auctions, this one required potential buyers to submit not only a dollar amount but also a detailed proposal of how exactly the book would be represented on the Web. It was that proposal, not the money that persuaded [the author] Maeve Binchy to sell her novel to a new Dutch company that will use Circle of Friends to help teach an online publishing course ..."
WebMaster, September/October, 1995
"A Novel Experience: At the Online BookStore, the Text is only the Beginning""The Online BookStore...isn't really a bookstore: It's more like a value-added publishing venture....
"Book publishers pay Fillmore...to create interactive online versions of their books, using the basic manuscript as a jumping-off point for a wealth of supplementary information. What the publishers get is good PR within the online community and the benefit of the research OBS performs in determining how best to present each work. What users get is much more than a bunch of words converted into HTML....
"...unlike traditionally published texts, online books can grow contextually richer as relevant information comes online and readers offer feedback....
"[Fillmore's] goal is to present a constantly evolving medium. 'The context becomes kinetic, as readers respond,' she says. 'In a sense, we're publishing our heads.'"