From Books to Beyond

"Our objective is to create a business that really is the leading force in curriculum-based Internet education," said James S. Cassano, president and chief executive officer of New Forum Publishers Inc.

New Forum offers a service that it calls Beyond Books, which consists of programs in specific subject areas that visitors to its Website can access with proper passwords. Each program presents information in written and visual form like a text book. But it also offers organized and rated links to many other Web sites, giving students a chance to explore topics that catch their interest in greater depth.

"We aggregate thousands and thousands of sites around individual subjects that are broken down parallel to school curriculum," Cassano said.

New Forum has been testing two Beyond Books programs in U.S. history for about a year. It plans to roll out three additional U.S. history programs, two world history programs, two American literature programs and two British literature programs in November and December.

The company plans to offer all its programs free this school year to middle and high schools with Internet access. Schools that accept the offer must let New Forum survey the students and teachers who use Beyond Books so it can improve the programs. They also must allow New Forum to use them to demonstrate how Beyond Books works.

1,000 schools

New Forum intends to charge schools $4 for each student that it has using a Beyond Books program in a school year. At that rate, Cassano said, the company needs to sign up roughly 2,000 students per program to break even.

"We are signing up schools at a rate of greater than one a day from all across the United States," he said.

Cassano's stint with Safeguard came in the mid-'80s, when he served as vice president of acquisitions'. After leaving that post, he went to work for Hill Arts and Entertainment Systems, a New Jersey company that developed software for managing the box-office and fund-raising functions of performing arts organizations.

Although it had many high-profile clients, the company was not profitable, so Hill decided to get it into the business of selling tickets. A series of mergers led it online and into Tickets.com which has filed to raise up to $56 million in an initial public offering.

One of the mergers led the comp to move its headquarters to California causing Cassano to leave. He was the widely acclaimed Web site run by the Independence Hall Association (www.ushistory.org) when he got the idea for Beyond Books.

"I started to get hundreds of thousands of comments from teachers, as well as parents and students, about what they were looking for on the Internet," he said.

Cassano shared his idea with the head of the social studies department at Conestoga High School in Berwyn. That led to brainstorming sessions with the entire department, which produced some ideas that Cassano tested in early versions of Beyond Books.

The initial funding for New Forum came from Cassano and other company officers. Additional funding has been provided by individual investors from around the company whose names Cassano wouldn't disclose. Those investors were told about New Forum by some Philadelphia investment bankers who had worked with them previously and have taken a stake in it, Cassano said.

Although he realizes New Forum will need more money to-reach its ultimate goal, Cassano said the company wants to grow more on its own before it seeks venture-capital financing.

One reason Cassano thinks it can is that Beyond Books will be a lot less expensive to market than most Internet ventures. New Forum plans to demonstrate it at major academic conferences to reach a lot of educators simultaneously. It also plans to market Beyond Books to school districts and state education departments.

"This is where our academic advisory board and having people who have the reputation and recognition that they do will assist us in getting in the doors," Cassano said.

Former educators with New Forum include Harry C. Payne, who chairs its Academic advisory committee and was the president of Williams College; and Richard Levy, New Forum's director of Internet education curriculum, who was the assistant superintendent of the Cherry Hill Public School System when Beyond Books was tested there.

Another reason Cassano thinks New Forum can expand significantly without venture funding is that adding customers doesn't add much in the way of costs. Running a Beyond Books program with 100,000 students isn't much more expensive than running one that has 100 students.

Beyond Books has been well-received so far. Jim Masker, a history teacher at The Cate School, a private high school near Santa Barbara, Calif., said it "provides access to such a wide variety of resources that you really have the opportunity to come to appreciate American history."

Masker said his students' only complaint about the service "is a great one from a teacher's perspective. They say, 'There's so much information there that I found myself just wanting to explore things.'"

Praise from Colorado

"I think if there's any problem they have, it's that they're ahead of the curve," he said.

That could slow the pace at which Beyond Books can grow. Schools with no or limited Internet access can't use it. Others may be reluctant to use it instead of text books but unable to afford to use it just to supplement them.

The teachers interviewed for this story and Cassano think it has some distinct advantages to text books, however. For one thing, it can be updated instantaneously, while text books simply grow more obsolete over time. For another, it allows children who may have trouble just standing in front of a classroom and talking to put together multimedia presentations that use the Internet.

"It allows them to do something they're really proud of," Reilly said. "I've got kids doing that right now."