SchlagerBlog

I’m happy to announce that additional Milestone Documents articles are now available individually from Amazon.com. We’ve been selling articles from Milestone Documents in American History on Amazon (as well as on MilestoneDocuments.com) for about year, but this week we have begun to load articles from the companion set, Milestone Documents of American Leaders. Thus, you can download articles that explain and analyze the primary documents of figures ranging from John Adams to George W. Bush to Susan B. Anthony to Frederick Douglass–and 100 more. Each article sells for $6.99 and carries the brand name “DocNotes,” so an easy way to find an article is to search for “DocNotes” plus the person’s name.

Although we will continue to build our deluxe, comprehensive reference sets (and users are still urged to check their library before buying an individual DocNotes article), offering our content by the article in places like Amazon and MilestoneDocuments.com is important, too, because so many students and teachers are served by library systems that won’t have our sets. We really do want to offer users the ability to get our content in whatever place or technology suits them best–whether via the library or the Internet or their mobile phone. While we’ve only just begun to tap the potential of this “anytime, anywhere” model of content delivery, there is no doubt in my mind that it’s the wave of the future.

Once the redesign for MilestoneDocuments.com is launched in early 2010, users will be able to download the American Leaders articles from our site, too, along with articles from our forthcoming Milestone Documents in World History.

Over the weekend, Apple gave quick approval to our newest apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch: Obama Speeches and Analysis and Lincoln Speeches and Analysis. Each app costs $1.99. In each case, we offer the full text of 4 iconic speeches along with complete expert commentary of the speeches by the Lincoln scholar Paul Finkelman (also the executive editor for our Milestone Documents series of reference books) and the presidential historian Chester Pach (writing about Obama). There are all sorts of cool features with these apps, from note-taking to highlighting to e-mailing to auto-scrolling. Learn more about them at the App store or in iTunes. Of course, both Lincoln and Obama are also included in our U.S. Presidential Speeches app (available in $.99 and $9.99 versions).

This past weekend, we showcased our Milestone Documents product line with an exhibit booth at the annual conference of the Texas Council for the Social Studies. It was an extremely rewarding experience for us, as we were able to meet hundreds of educators from around the state and introduce them to our materials. To celebrate the occasion, we gave away 3 Milestone Documents reference sets each day. I’m pleased to announce the winners here:

Day 1 winners

• Sarah Cook, Rockwall ISD
• Raff Saeed, Galena Park ISD
• Amanda Jimenez, Texas Tech University

Day 2 winners

• Margaret Eubanks, Goose Greek CSID
• Marilyn Wooldridge, Fort Worth ISD
• Alberto Guajardo, United ISD

Each one of these winners will receive the Milestone Docs reference set of their choice, which includes a 4-volume print set and free online access for their entire school via the Salem History platform.

In addition to the print winners, we gave away 50 iPhone apps for our new U.S. Presidential Speeches app. Half of the winners will receive the basic version, which includes the full text of 90 famous presidential speeches; the other half will receive the pro version, which also includes our award-winning expert analysis of each speech.

It was truly an exciting weekend for all of us here at Schlager Group, and we are already looking forward to next year’s TCSS conference in Houston.

Booklist continues to bring good news our way. Today comes word that the publication has starred its review of Milestone Documents of American Leaders, calling it “highly recommended for high school libraries” and an “excellent choice” for academic and public libraries as well. This review, like the interview with me for their “Bookmakers” feature, appears in the October 15 print issue; it’s available online here. For a roundup of what other reviewers have been saying about American Leaders, click here.

Recently I had the good fortune to be interviewed by Mary Ellen Quinn of Booklist magazine for that publication’s “Bookmakers” section. That interview has just appeared in the magazine’s October 15 issue; it’s available online here.

The interview covers a lot of ground, from my founding of the company in 1997 to the launch of our reference imprint in 2007 to our creation of MilestoneDocuments.com to our new iPhone apps. We are working on multiple fronts to make our content available and attractive to students and teachers and history buffs wherever and however they want it, and I’m grateful to Mary Ellen and Booklist for giving me the chance to talk about our efforts.

Those readers who get the print version of the magazine will also see a full-page advertisement for our newest reference set, Milestone Documents of American Leaders, as well as a very positive review of that set (more on that in a separate blog post in the next day or so).

It’s the start of review season for our most recent publication, Milestone Documents of American Leaders, as a bunch of appraisals in key publications will be appearing over the next 6 weeks. Leading off the coverage is a review in the October 1 issue of School Library Journal. (You can read the review online here; scroll down to “F” for Finkelman, Paul.) I am thrilled with this review because the writer highlights several critical aspects of the set:

• The primary documents covered range from the “personal and poignant” to the “public and political.”
•  ”Controversies … are recognized in an unbiased manner.”
• Our Questions for Further Study section (present in every entry) “will generate discussion in history classes”
• Purchase of the print set comes with free access to the same content online via Salem History
• Each entry includes a “helpful glossary and time line”
• Summing up: the work is “useful” and “informative” and a good companion to our award-winning first set, Milestone Documents in American History

Still to come in the next few weeks are reviews in Booklist, Choice, and Library Media Connection. I’ll be sure to share these reviews as they come in. In the meantime, librarians interested in purchasing Milestone Documents of American Leaders can do so by contacting Salem Press at 800-221-1592 or visiting their online site.

Check out our iPhone app: Presidential Speeches

I’m excited to announce that today we have released our first applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. “DocNotes: Presidential Speeches” is available in Basic ($.99) and Pro ($9.99) versions. The Basic version includes the full text of 90 famous presidential speeches in U.S. history, while the Pro version includes the full document texts plus a customized version of our award-winning expert commentary on each speech. You can learn more about the apps here, or you can search on “DocNotes” or “Presidential Speeches” in the App store.

There are a number of useful features in these apps, including bookmarking, highlighting, and note-taking. The Pro version allows you to e-mail a document (and accompanying analysis) with your inline notes and colored highlights.

These apps offer a promising new front in our business, one designed to make our content available to users wherever they are, in whatever format is convenient. Our foundation remains our reference encyclopedias, with our individual expert commentary on MilestoneDocuments.com serving a complementary function for students and researchers whose libraries don’t buy our sets. Now, for the first time, our content is mobile. These apps offer a great research tool for history students as well as a convenient teaching tool for educators. Plus, for the history buff, they’re just fun to explore.

We’ve got many more apps in development, including ones on Supreme Court decisions, Barack Obama and Abe Lincoln, and teaching activities for U.S. and World History teachers. I’ll be sure to keep readers updated on our progress on this blog.

I’m happy to announce that librarians who subscribe to Choice Reviews Online can now see a free e-book preview of Milestone Documents of American Leaders. The entire text of all 4 volumes is on display. This gives librarians a great chance to see what the publication is like before they purchase it. In the near future, we hope to load a free preview of Milestone Documents in American History as well. Unfortunately, Choice Reviews Online is restricted to subscribers only.Of course, librarians should also realize that they can get free previews of our publications in a different way, via a trial of Salem History. This trial shows how the free online database works as opposed to how the print set looks/works. Remember that any library that purchases a set gets both the print and the online for the same price.

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.

I’m happy to report that reviews have started to appear for Milestone Documents of American Leaders, and so far the news is nothing but good. First comes an exciting piece by Doug Achterman over at Gale’s “Doug Reference Reviews” site, who calls the set an “excellent companion” to our first title, the award-winning Milestone Documents in American History, and says the series as a whole is “outstanding.” Also just out is a review from American Reference Books Annual (ARBA), which terms the set “useful” and “attractive.” OK, so it’s not as effusive as the ARBA review from 2008 about American History, but it’s welcome nonetheless. Alas, the ARBA review is behind a pay wall, so I can’t link to the full review. As other reviews appear, I’ll be sure to mention them here.