Today we sent to the printer our latest book, Dr. John Morris’s Alone at Sea: Gloucester in the Age of the Dorymen (1623-1939) (Commonwealth Editions, Beverly, Mass.). Stunningly beautiful, thoroughly researched, and comprehensive (448 pages with 76 period photographs and maps), the book chronicles America’s premier fishing port during the age of sail — starting with Morris’s own story of his grandfather, a dory fisherman who drowned at sea. One photo shows the Harbor crowded with 400 masts; in another, a fisherman proudly holds up a 100-pound halibut. The book includes three appendixes — an extensive glossary of fishing terms; a chronology of annual catches beginning in 1808; and a list of ships and crewmen lost at sea since the 1600s, counting the widows and children left behind. Revealing the social history of an independent port build by immigrants and Yankees, the book proves all the more poignant in the context of today, on the eve of the Federal Government’s imposition of a Catch Share system that will essentially privatize the East Coast Atlantic Ocean fisheries as of May 1, turning its vast deeps and the fish therein into a commodity that can be brought, sold, and aggregated by the monied few, the banks and oil companies, ending the era of an open frontier worked by independent fishermen families in ports like Gloucester. Morris’s book makes history come alive, especially juxtaposed to the context of today.
interRAI Pioneers New Medical Publishing Model
The interRAI organization, a nonprofit founded in 1994, serves geriatric and disabled populations around the world with their health care instruments for evaluation and assessment of health care. OBS puts our publishing expertise to work in helping populate and manage their internet portal for the new suite of 15 medical publications — manuals and forms for each instrument. Their 70 Fellows worldwide translate the instruments and books to reach global markets.
OBS Imprint Protean Press Publishes “Kipling’s Cat”
Read about Protean Press’s latest book, “Kipling’s Cat” by Anne Cabot Wyman in the Gloucester Daily Times, or at the Wyman book site. Exciting times!
Pedagogical Interface (PI)
It seems to me that a Pedagogical Interface (PI) will prove to be a primary outcome of online publishing. Since the 1990s, publishers have gotten very good at using the internet as an infinite library of digits, a gigantic distribution pipe with a cash register at every possible outlet, an immediate means to access everyone on the globe through computers, pdas, phones, etc., delivering digitized content, new and repurposed. But so what, if all we are doing is republishing articles and pictures (PDFs) of static books (ebooks), and sharing self-contained recordings?
The online medium allows for dynamic, recorded interaction and change between perceiver and perceived, and thus I think that it is in the arena of music where a PI might best be developed, an infrastructure for learning about “content” while experiencing it. Bob Stein and the Voyager group was responsible for an early incarnation of the PI in the 1990s with their Schubert Trout Quintet. This CD application for the Mac was in effect living, breathing liner notes, accompanying the musical performance of this exquisite music. They also produced a Beethoven CD, an archive copy of which can be found at http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/11/published_by_the_voyager_compa.html
Music is universal (no need of translation), experiential, transcendent; our familiar media of paper (books, sheet music, liner notes, articles) is arguably the wrong medium for the musical message. Developing the PI in this area could bring us listeners, learners, performers to a vibrant new terra incognita . Maybe.