SCHOOL VENUE ON MENU SUPPLIERS IN RUSH TO PUT VIDEOS, BOOKS INTO CLASSROOMS.

Byline: Brent Hopkins Staff Writer

While school kids were jumping into pools and packing off to summer camp, David Sherman was working at his most hectic pace.

For Sherman, who shares the title of president of Chatsworth-based Aims Multimedia with his two brothers, summer entails taking his laptop home for long hours of updating his firm's online educational-video library.

At the time of year when most people are looking forward to kicking back and relaxing, the Shermans are rolling out new products, hitting the phones to stoke sales and rushing to fill orders. ``We got on the ball and tried to get ... much done before school was out. Then we really got moving once summer started,'' he said. ``For us, it's the busiest time. We're adding 500 new titles before the end of the year.''

The company began in the 1950s as a 16mm educational films for driver's training and other classes. Sherman's family bought the company in 1982, expanded its library and shepherded it through various formats - from film to video to laser disc to CD-ROM to its current online incarnation.

Today, it streams video over the Internet through its DigitalCurriculum program. The firm claims a user base of up to 20 million teachers, librarians and students for videos ranging from classroom staples, like the pairing of Robert Redford and Mia Farrow in ``The Great Gatsby'' or Franco Zeffirelli's ``Romeo and Juliet,'' to health films detailing the evils of chewing tobacco.

In addition to the videos, which teachers can access in classrooms and students can pull up at home, the company develops online quizzes and study guides for its 1,800 online titles. Used by the Los Angeles County Office of Education, Los Angeles Unified School District and Las Virgenes Unified School District, the online system is expected slowly to make even Aims' own library of video tapes and film strips obsolete, Sherman said.

``If they bought one video, it would be $300,'' he said. ``If they subscribe to this, with 1,800 titles that everyone can use, it's only $1,000.''

In more traditional media, Melvin Powers has spent the summer looking after his warehouse of 300 book titles. As publisher at Wilshire Book Co. in North Hollywood, he has watched his firm's titles end up all over the world as both guidebooks and English texts. He has sold the modern self-confidence fable, ``The Princess Who Believed in Fairy Tales,'' penned by his wife Marcia Grad, to primary and secondary schools, as well as universities and nontraditional education centers.

``Like all girls looking for their Prince Charming to come take care of them, this princess finally thinks she met him, but he turns out to be not so princely, and she goes on a self-discovery journey to see what life's all about,'' Powers said. ``It's used in both prisons and schools.''

He didn't get into the publishing business with education in mind, and it still accounts for only a small part of the more than 1 million books he sells annually, but he takes great pleasure in serving the school market. When Powers first published ``The Knight in Rusty Armor'' in 1990, he never figured the psychological parable would end up as an English primer for Chinese students.

``They asked me if the book could be used to teach English, and I agreed,'' said Powers, who still seems slightly bemused as he rifles through copies of the book in a dozen different languages. ``The answer is always yes. I got a big thrill out of it.''

Sun Valley-based American Historical Press has been racking up long- distance bills, trying to place its illustrated history books in school libraries. Mary Dolezal, director of retail operations, has been talking up the publisher's 50 titles, including ``Orange County: The Golden Dream'' and the forthcoming ``Des Moines and Polk County: Flag on the Prairie'' and ``Missouri: Crossroads of the Nation.''

``I'm busy planning who we're going to sell to. Our copy editor's working with authors, researching photos and getting all the materials together, doing edit after edit after edit,'' Dolezal said. ``Summertime is editing time, so that's when everyone's scurrying around. So much for taking a vacation.''

Brent Hopkins, [phone]

brent.hopkins(at)dailynews.com

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2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) David Sherman, co-president of Chatsworth-based Aims Multimedia, shows some titles the firm streams over the Net.

Joe Binoya/Special to the Daily News

(2 -- color) Melvin Powers looks after his 300 titles at Wilshire Book Co. in North Hollywood.

Tom Mendoza/Staff Photographer