Advocacy

Congress, voters, and the President all continued to focus on the issue of health care reform this week, and a major player in the political debate -- the Obama administration -- issued a report on how the escalating costs of health care adversely affect small businesses.

With President Obama pressing Congress to draft viable and fiscally prudent health care reform legislation by October, the debate over how to reform health care has intensified.

Literary reading among American adults is on the rise for the first time in more than 25 years, according to new report released this week by National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has announced the latest and perhaps most exclusive celebrity to ever have participated in its Get Caught Reading campaign -- Santa Claus!

In Get Caught Reading's newest image, which is inclusive of the "Books=Gifts" message, Santa takes a minute out of his busy gift-delivering eve to read a book. The image is available now on the Get Caught Reading website.

When global business news and information services provider Dow Jones & Co. launched an employee book drive to provide more than 4,000 titles for a new library that it's funding in Zambia, Jane Meyers, founder of the Lubuto Library Project, believed strongly that those books should come from an independent bookstore.

By Sandy Scott, Events Coordinator, The Galaxy Bookshop

RiverRun Bookstore held its second "Great Expectations: A Reading Marathon" (GERM), a 24-hour, customer read-a-thon from October 10 through October 11. Local college and high school students and other volunteers participated at RiverRun's used bookstore, SecondRun, to benefit a local nonprofit.

This October, RiverRun Bookstore will be hosting its second "Great Expectations: A Reading Marathon" (GERM), a 24-hour, customer read-a-thon. And now the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, bookstore is inviting independent booksellers nationwide to take up the challenge, too.

This month, a bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation to make health insurance more available and affordable for the employees of small businesses and for the self-employed. The legislation, the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP), S. 2795, is sponsored by Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), and Norm Coleman (R-MN).

On her way to a meeting of the Library of Congress' Reading Promotions Partners at the Center for the Book in Washington, D.C., ABA Director of Member Services Jill Perlstein stopped at several bookstores along the way to chat with their owners and snap a few photos for BookWeb.org's photo gallery.

In a trip covering over 600 miles in a little more than two days, Perlstein stopped at six ABA member stores.

Since its inception in 1966, Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) programs have prepared and motivated children to read by delivering free books and literacy resources to those who need them most -- underserved children from birth to age eight. Since 1975, RIF's Inexpensive Book Distribution program, which is authorized under the U.S.

On November 19, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence, a new analysis of reading patterns in the U.S. The study, which is a follow-up to NEA's 2004 Reading at Risk, revealed recent declines in voluntary reading and test scores alike, trends NEA described as having "severe consequences for American society."

November marks two important events for booksellers and readers: Children's Book Week 2007, sponsored by the Children's Book Council, and Jewish Book Month, sponsored by the Jewish Book Council.

Page23, a one-year-old project of Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona, promotes reading among people who may reject traditional marketing approaches through specially selected title lists, displays, and other promotional materials.

One Shared World, a campaign to raise awareness of global poverty and generate dialogue about solutions, is reaching out to booksellers in the Book Sense marketing program.