Since the 2010 annual meeting, all the current monographs have been made available as digital downloads from BookMasters. In fact, you can even go to Amazon and download a Kindle version of the AAOM Guides! How cool is that? I’ll answer that for you— it’s pretty darn cool. The remaining physical volumes are selling off slowly, but we are generating revenue that is greater than the storage and order fulfillment costs. We’ve made several thousand off of these and will be printing more of the Geriatric Guide with our new publisher. This has proven to be an adventure: Joel Laudenbach, his editors, and Mike Huber have put in huge amounts of effort and patience to make this work. The fate of other printed volumes remains to be seen: we will have to assess the demand for printed volumes vs. the cost and compare these to the sales of the downloads. Institutional or bulk orders may spur additional printings depending on circumstances.
We have at least verbal commitments from a few schools who will acquire our Vitalsource content. At least one has pulled through and resulted in actual money in our bank account! If more of these contracts do indeed materialize we could realize substantial revenue. Every effort has been made to reach out to decision-makers at Vitalsource schools to adopt our content. If you are one of these individuals, or know one of these individuals, please make an extra effort to both earn revenue for the AAOM and raise our profile to young students with future Oral Medicine careers.
The Oral Cancer Clinician’s Guide has been completed! The book looks fantastic and will prove a seminal work of the AAOM I am certain. Mad Props go out to Ross Kerr, Hillel Ephros, David Lederman, Joel Epstein and Bud Silverman as well as others from the Oral Cancer Task Force. It was a tremendous effort and the results are fantastic.
The Guide to Patients with Cancer is undergoing revision and completion is expected sometime in 2011. Between this volume and the Oral Cancer Clinician’s Guide volume, we will have two seminal works that cover almost any issue that might arise with malignancy. Dysplasias of the world, beware!
Everyone should be looking out for a pandemic—of awesomeness! Out of nowhere since the last meeting Brian Muzyka and his team has pulled together the new Clinician’s Guide to Infectious Disease! This terrific volume is a thorough update and expansion of one of the original set of Clinician’s Guides. Brian really accomplished this in record time and I can’t praise him enough. It’s chock full of viral, fungal, and mycobacterial goodness. Everyone should get out and grab a copy…if it doesn’t infect you first!
Finally, I have been working with the developer on the early editions of the Clinician’s Guide Apps for iPhone. They’re a bit rough around the edges, I have to admit, but it’s also real, tangible, and coming along. The first attempt is the Common Oral Lesions Guide, which is arguably the most difficult in terms of the number of images. The others should be a much smoother ride. Tally-ho!
To all of those purchasing and using the publications from the Academy, we thank you and welcome any feedback you might have. For all those who don’t…what are you waiting for? Your expert colleagues’ pearls of wisdom are just waiting to be picked!