New Media on my mind
I bought an iPhone last week, and I have quickly become addicted to it. The interface is of course incredible, but the revolutionary part has gotta be the Apps store. It’s those apps that give the device its reach and power and that make it so useful. One app I haven’t yet downloaded, but intend to, is Stanza–which makes it easier to read e-books on the phone. Like most publishers, I’m giving serious thought to ways in which our content might work on all sorts of e-reading devices, including the iPhone–whether in e-book form or as individual apps. It’s a challenge on a number of fronts, not least of which is the technical one–a big hurdle for a small publisher like us. But regardless of the obstacles, I think these are exciting times to be a publisher. So many potential avenues to explore for new customers, new partners, new product paradigms, and even entirely new businesses.
Speaking of new media, we are about to embark on a major redesign of MilestoneDocuments.com, our Web site geared directly toward teachers and students needing information about primary source documents. The first version of the site was launched a little less than a year ago, and as I blogged about at the time, we viewed it entirely as an experiment. We wanted to see whether our encyclopedia content had any appeal on a by-the-article basis. Although the results haven’t exactly been life-changing, we’ve had enough success to believe that the experiment should be expanded and continued. In the forthcoming version of the site, we’ll seek to make it a user-friendly destination for all sorts of information about primary documents, not merely a place to buy some good encyclopedia articles for a few bucks. We’ll be adding tons of new, free content (including information about famous documents in world history), and we’ll be integrating the separate Milestone Documents Blog content onto the main MilestoneDocuments.com home page. The result will be an entirely new approach to the topic for us, with continuous updates and stories about primary sources in the news, in the classroom, in our lives. (As we prepare for this new era, readers of the MD Blog will probably notice a slowdown in the number of posts.) The new site will also have a greatly expanded section for educators, who for obvious reasons are a crucial partner for us as we try to facilitate document-based learning in the classroom.
One of the great things about the past year has been seeing the extent to which history has been a part of the national dialogue. Much of this, of course, is due to the historic election of Barack Obama as president, but it has extended to all sorts of topics–comparisons between the Great Depression and our current, ongoing “Great Recession”; comparisons between the recent election controversy in Iran and the Iranian Revolution 30 years ago; etc. But whatever the cause, it has seemed that discussions about history have been everywhere. I think this is supremely healthy for our society, and one of our goals as a publisher is to help teachers and students navigate their way through such discussions. We’ll continue to do that through our print encyclopedias, which we spend so much energy and time producing. But we are also excited about finding other venues in which to do that. I’ll keep you posted on our various new media experiments in the months ahead.